Last Updated on May 25, 2022
Summary
You’ve probably thinking lolcat is just triviality. Possibly. But with a bit of imagination and flair, you can have some fun with plain text using lolcat. Inject some awesomeness to your terminal today!
There’s plenty to tinker way by way of command-line arguments.
Type lolcat -h at the shell for the list.
As you can see, you can change the rainbow spread, the frequency of the rainbow effect, and change the seed (i.e. the initial value for the random number generator). The rainbow spread refers to the inclination of the rainbow stripes.
We illustrated the animate flag in the video on the previous page. But you can also change the animation duration and/or speed. It’s also possible to invert the foreground and background, and enable 24-bit color support. What more could you want?
Summary
Website: github.com/busyloop/lolcat
Support:
Developer: moe and contributors
License: 3-clause BSD license
lolcat is written in Ruby. Learn Ruby with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Linux Candy | |
|---|---|
| ASCIIQuarium | Embrace marine life from the terminal with beautiful ASCII art |
| ASCII Art Converter | A small utility that converts images into ASCII art |
| BobRossQuotes | Collection of quotes from Bob Ross |
| Boxes | Command line ASCII boxes |
| Buoh | Online strips comics reader |
| cacafire | Color ASCII fire |
| catclock | xclock with an enhanced cat mode |
| cbonsai | Generate bonsai trees in the terminal |
| christmasfetch | Festive cheer on the desktop |
| chucknorris | Chuck Norris jokes in your terminal |
| cornyjokes | Corny jokes for the terminal |
| CMatrix | ncurses program that simulates the display from “The Matrix” |
| ctree | A Christmas tree right on your terminal |
| eDEX-UI | Sci-fi computer terminal emulator and system monitor |
| emoj | Simple tool that to find suitable emojis for pasting to your clipboard |
| Emote | Modern popup emoji picker |
| Evolvotron | Interactive generative art |
| Fantascene | Dynamic wallpaper changer |
| Fondo | Find beautiful wallpapers from Unsplash |
| gti | Typo-based curio inspired by Steam Locomotive |
| Hollywood | Fill your console with Hollywood melodrama technobabble |
| linuxwave | Generate music from the entropy of Linux |
| lolcat | Rainbows and unicorns |
| No More Secrets | Recreates the data decryption effect from the Sneakers movie |
| nook | Plays Animal Crossing hourly themes on the hour |
| nyancat | Terminal-based Pop Tart Cat Animation |
| oneko | Animal chasing fun |
| pipes.sh | Animated pipes terminal screensaver |
| ponysay | cowsay reimplemention for ponies |
| projectM | Music visualizer originally based on Milkdrop |
| pscircle | A different take on the venerable ps command |
| PyBonsai | Generates procedural ASCII art trees |
| pyjokes | One line jokes for programmers |
| Pywal | Generate color schemes on the fly |
| Relaxator | Relax to soothing sounds |
| Rusty Aquarium | Monitoring by visualization |
| Steam Locomotive | C program written in 295 lines. It's harmless fun |
| Ternimal | Animated lifeform in the terminal |
| terminal-parrot | Party parrot time |
| tetris | Tile-matching puzzle video game in your terminal |
| Variety | Wallpaper manager with many desktops and wallpaper sources |
| WallGen | Generate HQ poly wallpapers with a few arguments. |
| WallpaperDownloader | Download, change, and manage wallpapers |
| xcowsay | Displays a cow on your desktop with message |
| XDecorations | Add some festive cheer to your desktop |
| XScreenSaver | Framework and collection of screensavers |