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toilet

Render large ASCII art text banners (FIGlet-compatible with extra styling).

Category: Fun ASCII banner terminal figlet-compatible

Install

# RHEL / Alma / Rocky (EPEL usually required)
sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf install toilet

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install toilet

# openSUSE
sudo zypper install toilet

# Arch
sudo pacman -S toilet

What it does

toilet prints large ASCII art text banners in the terminal. It is compatible with FIGlet fonts and adds extra effects like color filters, metallic rendering, and alignment controls.

How it works (mechanical)

  • Uses FIGlet-style font files (typically in /usr/share/figlet).
  • Renders characters into large ASCII representations.
  • Supports additional filters (color, border, crop, metal, etc.).

Quick Start

# Basic banner
toilet Hello

# With color filter
toilet --gay Linux

# Centered output
toilet -c "System Ready"

10 Practical Examples

  1. Basic usage 
    toilet "Welcome"
  2. Specify font 
    toilet -f mono12 "Server"
  3. List available fonts 
    toilet -F list
  4. Apply rainbow filter 
    toilet --gay "Linux"
  5. Metal effect 
    toilet -F metal "CLARUS"
  6. Add border 
    toilet -F border "Alert"
  7. Crop extra whitespace 
    toilet -F crop "Compact"
  8. Combine filters 
    toilet -F metal -F border "System"
  9. Pipe input 
    echo "Maintenance" | toilet
  10. Use in MOTD script 
    # Add to login script
toilet -f mono9 -F metal "Welcome Back"

Notes & Gotchas

  • Fonts: Stored in FIGlet directories; font availability varies by distro.
  • Terminal width: Wide banners may wrap awkwardly—adjust font or center with -c.
  • Color filters: Some filters depend on terminal color support.
  • FIGlet comparison: toilet extends figlet with filters and UTF-8 support.

Historical Context

toilet was developed as an enhanced FIGlet-compatible banner generator. Despite its humorous name, it became popular for colorful and stylized terminal headings, especially in shell customization and MOTD displays.

Modern Equivalent

Modern alternatives include figlet, prompt theming tools, and rich-text terminal dashboards. However, toilet remains lightweight and effective for quick ASCII banners.

Related Commands

  • figlet — classic ASCII banner generator.
  • cowsay — ASCII speech bubbles.
  • fortune — random quotes for banners.
  • banner — traditional UNIX banner utility.