Bring some coloration to your Linux terminal with lolcat

Today marks the fifth day of the Linux command-line toys introduction calendar. If that is your first go to to the collection, you may be asking your self, what’s a command-line toy. Even I am not fairly certain, however typically, it might be a recreation, or any easy diversion that helps you’ve gotten enjoyable on the terminal.

It’s fairly attainable that a few of you should have seen numerous alternatives from our calendar earlier than, however we hope there’s a minimum of one new factor for everybody.

Today’s choice, lolcat, is the primary utility I am together with that wasn’t packaged for my Linux distribution, however it was nonetheless a straightforward set up. It’s a Ruby program that you simply ought to have the ability to simply add to your system with the next.

$ gem set up lolcat

After that, merely pipe some textual content to it to see the output within the colours of the rainbow. For instance, utilizing a few utilities from earlier days in our introduction calendar, attempt the next:

$ fortune | packing containers -a c -d parchment | lolcat

Depending on what success you’ve gotten, you will seemingly get one thing like this:

There are just a few parameters you may go to lolcat, and somewhat than repeat all of them right here, I might recommend you both go to the lolcat GitHub page or simply see them on the terminal by typing lolcat –help. But typically, they’re useful to set the unfold and frequency of your rainbow, and my private favourite, enabling animation. Who does not like animated rainbow printing on the terminal? Let’s attempt the above once more, with a unique field (cat-themed, after all) and a cat-appropriate fortune that was in my fortunes listing, with the next.

fortune -m "nine tails" | packing containers -a c -d cat | lolcat -a

lolcat is open supply underneath a BSD license.

Do you’ve gotten a favourite command-line toy that you simply suppose I must profile? The calendar for this collection is usually stuffed out however I’ve obtained just a few spots left. Let me know within the feedback beneath, and I will test it out. If there’s area, I will attempt to embrace it. If not, however I get some good submissions, I will do a round-up of honorable mentions on the finish.

Check out yesterday’s toy, Have a cow at the Linux command line, and verify again tomorrow for an additional!