Like seeing rainbows all over the place? Does it make you especially happy to have a colorful terminal? Yeah, me too. There’s a little Ruby program called lolcat and it will help you out (in the happiness department).

lolcat_rainbow_terminal_colorful_pandora_cli_pianobar

Steps to a super colorful terminal:

  1. Install lolcat in one of two ways.
    1. As a Ruby gem using the standard Ruby utility.  gem install lolcat
    2. Through your system’s package manager.  sudo apt-get install lolcat
  2. Pipe your program through lolcat.
    • cat cool_file.txt | lolcat

That’s really it. The only problem I’ve come across is when piping through a program that is still in control of the terminal output.  My main example is with Pianobar, the Pandora CLI app. It doesn’t actually break anything, you just can’t see the last line of the terminal. This means the song progress can’t be seen, and it can be a problem if the user is expected to enter information. I’ve gotten used to it though, it’s really worth it for the colors!

Have fun with rainbows all up in your face!

git_help_lolcat_rainbow_colors_cli_terminal