How to Create ASCII Text Banners in Terminal

Introduction

We will show how to create ASCII text banners from plain text, command-line utility called FIGlet

FIGlet is a simple command-line utility for creating ASCII text banners or large letters out of ordinary text.

Install figlet

sudo apt install figlet     #Debian/Ubuntu
sudo yum install figlet     #CentOS/RHEL
sudo dnf install figlet     #Fedora 22+

Using figlet

• You can use the command plus the text that you want to transform as a banner or large text as shown below

figlet UNIXCOP.COM

• Use the -c flag to create the Banner at the center

figlet -c UNIXCOP.COM

Also use -l to set the output to the left or -r to print it to the right.

• Control the output width with the -w switch, the default width is 80 columns.

figlet -w Hi UNIXCOP Visitors

• Use the full width of your terminal with the -t 

figlet -t Hi UNIXCOP Visitors

• Use the -k flag to add a little space between the printed characters

figlet -t -k Hi UNIXCOP Visitors

• Also you can read text from a file using the -p option

figlet -kp < file.txt

• You can specify another font, using the -f flag, fonts are stored in /usr/share/figlet.

ls -al /usr/share/figlet

For example I used font shadow.tlf and slant.tlf as shown below

figlet -f shadow UNIXCOP

figlet -f slant UNIXCOP

Conclusion

That’s it

We showed you how to install and use figlet to Create ASCII Text Banners in Terminal.

Thanks.