ASCII Art is BACK! (Generating ASCII Art Text from the Terminal)

Want to add COOL ASCII ART to your config files or your terminal? In this video, I'll show you how you can generate ASCII text with the terminal commands figlet and toilet. I'll also show you how you can color it with lolcat, display it when you start your terminal, how to copy it to your favorite text editor and more. Finally you can show off your cool desktop to your "friends" on Reddit!

0:00 Intro
1:23 Basic usage
2:06 Installing fonts
4:02 Additional options
4:47 Colorizing the output with lolcat
5:10 Displaying text when you start a terminal
5:51 Copying the output to the clipboard
6:45 Additional filters with toilet
8:14 Conclusion

[tonyramirez]

ASCII art has such an appeal I cannot quite explain... I'm a little younger to have lived the times when it truly proliferated, but in a web so over saturated it's suffocating it feels like a total breather.

[thenextpoetician]

Figlet and Lolcat are all-time classics. I rarely use them, but when I get a pang of nostalgia, well, there it is.

[laughingvampire]

in the 1990s in the BBS's there was a distinction between ascii art and ansi graphics

[DeniseNepraunig]

Woah the combination of figlet, the 3d font and lolcat is soooo

[therollingambit]

Great video! Is there any way to keep the ascii art at the top of the terminal after I execute "clear"?

[joelchrono]

I hope you start making some blogposts and some art like these there :P

[bruhsoulz]

lol i happened to find these thru chatgpt like yesterday nice to see how they can be used

[scsc]

How about a more expanded tutorial using others such as Neofetch? Also converting png/jpg and getting the art (distro art, i.e.) to
format correctly in an editor like Kate, Kwriter, etc.

[bettercalldelta]

Also, if you want toilet's filters without actually using another font (you need text as it is), use the "term" font. For example,
$ echo Hello, World! | toilet -f term -F gay:border

[madvibes]

what shell interputer are you using?? (i think auto completion will help me a lot)

[occultsupport]

what colorscheme is your desktop? Look great!

[hvfizul]

hii.. what figlet font are you using for that "i use arch btw" words?

[omerfarooqsyed]

useless linux tools? nah, this is more useful to me than sed.

[Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Hahaha... ASCII art was the good old BBS days where everything was ASCII... Yay! Its back!
Yep I do it like a noob. I use a web site... 🤣
Did not know Figlet was a thing but it is cool. So Toilet is --gay... Now that is funny! 😆
I'm sure some "Karen" out there is going to be butt hurt over that one! Who cares... Lol

Thanks for the video..


LLAP 🖖

[SneedusFeedus]

"welcome to useless linux tools" lmfao we love it though

[iamroot]

there is figlet.nvim to do this directly in neovim