Last Updated on May 25, 2022
In Operation
Here’s an example of the output from xcowsay. The position of the cow appears in a (fairly) random place on your desktop. The program determines the amount of time to display the text based on its length, although you can override this setting. The bubble is anti-aliased. And there’s automatic word wrapping.
There’s 3 different sizes of cow. xcowsay has a –cow-size option that lets you select from small, medium, and large cow images.
There’s a think mode which outputs a thought bubble instead of the usual speech bubble.
Some jokes are just too dreadful to air in public!
There’s many other options available such as the ability to make the bubble appear to the left of the cow, change the message font, add a reading speed, and more.
The latest release has added a new feature where you can replace the text with an image. This uses the –dream flag. The cow below is having some bad thoughts indeed.
And you can even replace the cow image with an alternative non-cow image. Or you might be interested in ponysay, a cowsay reimplemention for ponies.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Followed your instructions to the T and not really sure if this is working or not ? How will I know? Can I run something to invoke it? On Arch Linux.
That’s an exercise for the reader.