Fun with ASCII art

No, in fact ASCII art isn’t dead, it’s all the rage. Now that that’s established, check out these handy programs for generating your own ASCII art messages:

1
figlet -f smslant Boxes rules. | boxes -d parchment -a hcvc

boxes

Figure 1. boxes provides boundless entertainment.

1
figlet -f standard Also figlet. | boxes -d mouse -a hcvc

figlet

Figure 2. figlet and its inherent awesomeness.

Spice up those bland Bash scripts with entertaining comment formats!

But seriously, these utilities can make for more interesting banners, alert messages, and so on:

  • boxes: Creates ASCII art boxes around entered text
  • figlet: Creates large ASCII art versions of entered characters

Just because it’s the command line doesn’t mean it has to be boring!

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7 Responses to Fun with ASCII art

  1. niczar says:

    I see your figlet and raise you a toilet: http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/toilet

  2. @niczar Awesome. I had not seen that one, thanks!

  3. don’t forget cowsay

  4. Salam says:

    Hi,
    Is there a way to load the ASCII arts in bash command i mean like figlet
    ls /usr/share/figlet
    ls /usr/share/ascii ?
    and what is the difference between figlet and ascii i am confused
    when ever i googled for ascii arts just got figlet!
    what i want is that i want to write a script in bash command, that loads the ascii arts and make a filter from those arts and send to email as a header from bash command.
    thanks in advance

  5. ASCII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII) is a character encoding method. figlet is a utility that uses lots of various ASCII characters to form the larger characters of user-provided words. Quite different animals :-) This has some info on ASCII art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii_art

    For you particular need, you’d want to take your header text, send that to figlet (see example in post), then capture figlet’s output and use it in forming your email.

  6. Salam says:

    Thanks Samuel Huckins

    I got this error for the first one thought ‘unknown box design — parchement’ but the second works fine. And that’s enough for me, but again how can i put the mouse as a header in my email, here is so far what i managed. Please ppl, i am new just trying to learn

    clear
    echo “Type your email please”
    read email;
    echo “Subject”
    read subject;
    echo “your msg”
    read msg;

    figlet -f $subject $msg | mail -s “Subject” $email;
    echo “A msg has been sent to $email with the subject $subject and message $msg”

    Thanks in advance again