Marching Ants

What Does Marching Ants Mean?

Marching ants is a slang term for an animation effect first used in the MacPaint program designed by Bill Atkinson in 1984. By today’s standards, it is a rather simple animation program that simulates motion on a screen. It is most commonly seen as a moving border of dots around a selected item.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Marching Ants

The marching ants effect happens when programmers create visual lines that can move from one area to the other. The common example of marching ants is the selection box in various paint and graphic design utilities, where the borderline of the box is set up to consist of moving dots or lines. Marching ants can be implemented in many ways, for example, with a frame-by-frame GIF, or a source code command to incrementally shift a series of colored pixels. It is commonly used in image and visual design tools.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Privacy and Compliance Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…