Toilet and Figlet
posted Sep 21st 2009 3:00pm by Mike Szczysfiled under: linux hacks
We thought [Kristofer's] Tech Tip about using figlet with scripts was kind of fun. It’s a throwback to the days of logging onto a BBS and being greeted by a vertically scrolling ASCII art image that had been meticulously hand crafted (although a lot of the coolest stuff was actually ANSI art). No hand crafting here, just feed (or pipe) your text to figlet and it outputs the message in ASCII style letters.
When we went to try install this in Ubuntu, the toilet package was suggested. This one’s worth checking out too. It works in much the same way as figlet but uses extended characters and has a lot more color and font settings:
Give these packages a try and make character art cool again!
Hmm… can’t say that I have a use for it as most of my scripting stays in the background, but it does remind me of the good old bbs days. I miss them occasionally, but I don’t miss the old 2400 bps modem (that I was still using until 1997…memories).