Make Big ASCII Text With figlet

April 2022

The figlet command line tool makes big, ascii art style text out of whatever you pass it. For example:

figlet "Hello"
 _   _      _ _       
| | | | ___| | | ___  
| |_| |/ _ \ | |/ _ \ 
|  _  |  __/ | | (_) |
|_| |_|\___|_|_|\___/

There's a bunch of fonts which can be called with the -f flag:

figlet -f gothic "Hello"

_-_-            ,, ,,       
  /,            || ||       
  || __    _-_  || ||  /'\\ 
 ~||-  -  || \\ || || || || 
  ||===|| ||/   || || || || 
 ( \_, |  \\,/  \\ \\ \\,/

All the fonts are stored in a figlet directory you and find with:

figlet -I2

A quick way to list them is:

figlet -I2 | xargs ls

Figlet is available on macOS via homebrew with:

brew install figlet

Installing it on other operating systems is left as an exercise for the reader.

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