In the beginning there was ASCII. OK, that's not true. I'm sure somebody's going to email pointing out what came before ASCII. But let's just pretend that's the case for the sake of simplicity, eh?

It's amazing what can be done with letters and symbols. It goes way beyond simply displaying text. As a college student, hacking away at a VAX terminal in the early 90s, I (and many others) spent hours chuckling at the likes of cows.

"ASCII art", as it became known, didn't go away. It was just deprecated (Wikipedia has a good article). But it's still available under Linux, even if you might have to rummage through your package repository to find it. And one of the most entertainingly useless ASCII art tools is figlet.

figlet simply renders text in various ASCII fonts, like this:

figlet keir

 _        _
| | _____(_)_ __
| |/ / _ \ | '__|
|   <  __/ | |
|_|\_\___|_|_|
 

Useful command options include -w, by which you can set the width of the display (in characters), thus causing words to wrap if you want to render a sentence. The -f option lets you define a different font style to use; under Ubuntu and Debian, several fonts are installed with the default package and are stored in /usr/share/figlet. You can center the text with -c.

What can you use figlet for? It can make for pretty cool email sigs, but only if you can guarantee that the recipient views emails in a fixed-width font (you could use HTML email, I guess, and specify a font to display the figlet text, but that's awfully... modern.)

At one point there was a trend for email newsletters to use filget text for their headers, such as NTK and Popbitch.

For the rest of us, a good use of figlet is to add it to the end of your .bashrc file, so that figlet text appears whenever you login, or whenever you open a terminal window.

(See also banner. Same kinda thing but a little more primitive.)