Linux Candy

Linux Candy: lolcat – rainbows and unicorns

Last Updated on May 25, 2022

In Operation

lolcat concatenates files, or standard input, to standard output, and adds rainbow coloring to it. If you start lolcat with just the command, it’ll add rainbow coloring to the text you type. We can do much better.

In the example below, we’ve converted a jpeg picture to ASCII with the jp2a utility, and applied lolcat’s magic rainbow coloring.

$ jp2a caterpillar-46202_960_720.jpg | lolcat

A psychedelic caterpillar!

jp2a and lolcat

You can animate the rainbow colored text with the -a flag. For example, let’s couple figlet with lolcat with the command:

$ figlet -w 100 We love Linux Candy | lolcat -a

Every line is faded through an animation before printing the next one.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary

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