Fun With Toilet

Shell feeling shabby? Let Toilet spice it up! Toilet is a shell utility from caca labs that outputs text in large block type. It is modeled after figlet, adding color and Unicode support.
Note: some examples given here are non-POSIX. I use bash and have confirmed the examples work in zsh.

I installed toilet on my (Ubuntu) system using the following command. Use your package manager or get the source.

sudo apt-get install toilet toilet-fonts

Toilet comes with a number of fonts by default, installed to /usr/share/figlet on my system. The following command, run from the directory containing the fonts, will create a file that contains the name of each available font followed by an example. Note that while the name of the font file with the extension is used in the following command, the extension is not necessary.

for font in *; do
    echo "$font" && toilet Hello -f "$font";
done > ~/toilet_fonts.txt

Now you have a file with all the fonts, useful for reference.

$ head ~/toilet_fonts.txt
ascii12.tlf

 mm    mm            mmmm      mmmm
 ##    ##            ""##      ""##
 ##    ##   m####m     ##        ##       m####m
 ########  ##mmmm##    ##        ##      ##"  "##
 ##    ##  ##""""""    ##        ##      ##    ##
 ##    ##  "##mmmm#    ##mmm     ##mmm   "##mm##"
 ""    ""    """""      """"      """"     """"

Toilet also comes with options to further transform or decorate your text, called "filters." The following command will output the name of each filter followed by an example, as above. This command outputs to the terminal rather than a file because the filters that add color may not come thru in the saved file

while read -r filt;
    do echo "$filt";
    toilet -f mono12 $USER -F "$filt";
done < <(toilet -F list | sed -n 's/\"\(.*\)\".*/\1/p')

I like border, flip, and left, but the best filter is of course "gay". Mix and match fonts and filters to come up with a combination you like. Note that the filter switch can take a colon separated list of filters e.g.

toilet "07734" -F gay:180 -f smblock

Excepting the "metal" and "gay" filters, Toilet does not add colors to your text. This is as it should be as there are already utilities to add color to text in the terminal. I know what you're thinking: "but those terminal escape sequences are a nightmare!" and I was thinking the same thing 'til the fine folks of #bash set me straight. To wit, there is a tool called tput which handles color more gracefully than escape sequences. I encourage you to check out the examples of using tput to color terminal text. If you just want to get started, use tput setaf x and tput setab x to color your foreground and background, respectively, substituting x with a number 0-9 for different colors. See man tput and man terminfo ("Color Handling" section) for more.

So as for what you can actually do with toilet... that will be an excercise left to the reader. A friendly greeting in bashrc or a big red warning message are two uses that spring to mind. Drop me a line and let me know how you use it. Have fun!