figlet – a program for making large letters out of ordinary text | Hacker News Reader

figlet – a program for making large letters out of ordinary text

figlet.org

140 pointspmoriarty59 comments

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Two useful links:

- http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/toilet : a figlet with vitamints

- https://github.com/xero/figlet-fonts : more fonts for figlet and toilet.

> http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/toilet

Amazing logos / mascots. I love the whole site :D

> TOIlet is in its very early development phase.

Hrrmm, seems like last release was more than 10 years ago.

The `--filter=` values are pretty telling on that one.

I tried to Ctrl+F for these, but they're actually in the screenshot.

Similar to this, many years ago on HN there was a website shared that would convert an image into HTML. I used it to generate the 404 image on my personal website: https://micro.muppetz.com/404 - Warning often causes older/slower browsers to really choke!

If anyone remembers what that URL was, I'd love you to share it. No amount of googling recently has been able to find it, I expect it's probably lost to the sands of time. I've tried a few others I found on google but none produce anything like that quality.

Is there a point to converting an image to HTML? I can use various programs to convert an image to SVG.

I think it's for fun

Purely for fun - I'd like to make some more 404 pages like the one I linked to, and other various bits. I really like rendering images using text and the webapp I used did such a great job (IMHO) I don't think it has any practical purpose.

If you have some interest in image processing, and know a little bit of HTML, a program like that would be a great learning project!

Sadly the only programming "language" I know is ircII and that's not exactly in demand :)

libcaca [0] command img2txt can output html

[0] http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

Though I've never tried it, I believe it can also be used by mpv to play videos in ascii.

I remember back in the day watching videos using mplayer with its ascii output. That was always a riot!

Ffmpeg can work with aalib

I remember coming across this one a long time ago. Could this be it?

https://neil.fraser.name/software/img2html/

Sadly, it appears it doesn't work anymore. I remember it having very good quality.

I like to use the VSCode extension for this, ASCIIDecorator. It's good for having readable text in the Minimap.

> It's good for having readable text in the Minimap.

Nice. Good idea.

There are so many web based ascii text generators out there. What sets this one apart?

Edit: looks like all those web based ascii text generators are just using figlet under the hood.

Existing multiple decades ago and being available on just about every FOSS operating system.

I just realized now that many of the web based ascii text generators use figlet under the hood. I wish I could delete my comment but I seem to be unable to.

I have a popular web based ascii text generator (https://patorjk.com/software/taag), it uses FIGlet driver that I wrote (https://github.com/patorjk/figlet.js/). Many of the other ones out there also use their own drivers (I've seen some written in php and python). There are also different types of ASCII text fonts out there other than FIGlet (ex: my app compiles fonts that were made in the AOL days in the Arial font - which is interesting because it's a non-monospaced font).

FIGlet is the most popular spec for these types of fonts though (it's an app and a spec). The mailing list hasn't been active in a decade, but people used to submit fonts there. It was cool to see what people made.

Love Figlet, we used to use it frequently on the shared unix machine where members of the Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association (CSUA) would hang out: https://www.csua.berkeley.edu/

It makes more sense if you mention that on soda, /etc/motd was used as a threaded forum and wall as realtime chat.

True. Is soda still a thing? IIRC, soda also allowed non-root users to use the wall utility?

Patched to say "Boredcast message", as I recall!

Yes, that is correct.

I don't think it's been a thing for years and if you ask me, it stopped being a thing when the old Sequent Symmetry went. Not only non-root users could wall, remote users could wall. A smaller, sillier internet.

I respectfully disagree. There was a vibrant community on soda well into the early aughts, even if it was running FreeBSD on x86 vs. some older more esoteric hardware architecture.

It's good to see that the CSUA encyclopedia still exists somewhere, even if it's not hosted on soda anymore: https://www.erzo.org/shannon/writing/csua/encyclopedia.html I had the good fortune to meet and work with the primary author at a small games company called Skotos Tech during my later undergraduate years.

I mean, I'm not being entirely serious but it was kind of the beginning of the end as shell accounts became increasingly pointless. Although maybe my mental timeline is a bit off, I remember a lottery scheduler getting implemented on the FreeBSD soda and those writeups seem to be from the late 90s not early 00s as I thought.

The t-shirts used to be a good way to run into strangers IRL who would inform you that they too partied with Nick Weaver.

Yes, I partied with Nick Weaver. The lottery scheduler was implemented in the late 90’s, but soda’s kernel ran with the lottery schedule well into the aughts.

I agree that shell accounts weren’t as important by the aughts, but the culture was still going strong in the early aughts.

Also to mention soda’s kernel was patched to kprint() a rootcow at boot, before even the network driver was loaded. Dedication to style.

I love figlet! I use it to generate the ssh banner in every server I set up. Not just for the l33t factor ;) but also to quickly confirm visually which host I'm connecting to (specially when multi-hopping, where you can see the whole chain of hosts). It works not only with pure ssh, but also with tools working on top of it (scp, rsync, port forwarding... I'm not sure if even sshfs).

Same here! I feel "at home" when I set a more personnal banner. ;-)

Still I did not know figlet was a thing: I hitherto used the Text to ASCII Art Generator (from patorjk.com) to do so. So thank you for posting this. Obviously a CLI tool had to exist, but I never thought about it.

I like to use cowsay for this - in non-work settings.

neofetch > motd is also nice.

https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch

                        'c.          <hostname redacted>
                     ,xNMM.          ----------------------------------
                   .OMMMMo           OS: macOS Catalina 10.15.7 19H1519 x86_64
                   OMMM0,            Host: MacBookPro13,3
         .;loddo:' loolloddol;.      Kernel: 19.6.0
       cKMMMMMMMMMMNWMMMMMMMMMM0:    Uptime: 5 days, 19 hours, 2 mins
     .KMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMWd.    Packages: 38 (brew), 620 (nix-user)
     XMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX.      Shell: zsh 5.7.1
    ;MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM:       Resolution: 3440x1440
    :MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM:       DE: Aqua
    .MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX.      WM: Quartz Compositor
     kMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMWd.    WM Theme: Orange (Light)
     .XMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMk   Terminal: iTerm2
      .XMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMK.   Terminal Font: Iosevka-Fixed-Slab-Medium 16
        kMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMd     CPU: Intel i7-6700HQ (8) @ 2.60GHz
         ;KMMMMMMMWXXWMMMMMMMk.      GPU: Intel HD Graphics 530, AMD Radeon Pro 450
           .cooc,.    .,coo:.        Memory: 10974MiB / 16384MiB

I always used to use both.

figlet | cowsay -n

Previous thread from 2020, 61 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24926979

People re-post stuff like this all the time → https://xkcd.com/1053/

All the previous threads (plural) [1] have something interesting.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=figlet

All the previous threads (plural) [1] have something interesting.

That's the point of the previouslies-type comments

Here’s an intro to toilet (similar tool) I wrote a while back: https://sequoia.makes.software/fun-with-toilet/

  # figlet $HOSTNAME > /etc/motd

On every box I own.

+ #-CPU-Core + RAM Size. That's me. :)

I gotta agree with someone named outworlder above -- you probably should look into `neofetch` as its output might please you.

Wow, the page has a few ftp:// links. The infrastructure must be really stable.

If you have a Mac, Monodraw [1] includes figlet - just select a Font from the rect/text tool. It also supports custom/additional figlet fonts.

[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com

Nice. I've used this for years. I love self-descriptive code so I use a `flowerbox` and `flowerpot` bash script daily, with flowerpot being just an alias of figlet.

I've use figlet, then later toilet for readable log messages.

   apt-get install toilet 

   toilet --filter border --font future compile starting

I've 'ported' 3x3 and fakoo fonts to figlet/toilet format some time ago https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2021/05/18/3x3-typeface/

I made use of a “for fun” type React module called react-rainbow-ascii (paraphrasing) that had figlet integration that worked really nicely just yesterday. If the author stumbles upon this comment, just know I appreciate the ability to leverage all of the figlet fonts!

Frequently use figlet in shell scripts to demarcate sections. Very handy tool!

Has anyone made a JavaScript port?

Edit: ooh. There's this. But it's 6MB. https://www.npmjs.com/package/figlet

figlet, cowsay and tractorgen are the essentials on any UNIX machine

Ooh, do cowsay next!

text art with functional value: https://github.com/reportaman/arttime. It's displays your text art/figlet, while serving as a nifty clock/timer. No dependencies other than having zsh installed on your system, which exists on Mac by default.

anyone remember the web version at good ol' flamingtext.com/tools/figlet? rip

I use http://www.patorjk.com/software/taag/

It has a "Test All" button that's fun.

i was using this tool with watch to see some headline metrics :)

Figlet is so much fun.

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