Today I came across FIGlet, a little program for making large letters (signatures, banners, etc.) out of plain text.
I think I always vaguely pictured computer nerds sitting around for days on end painfully positioning pipes and underscores to create these obscure pieces of internet art. Now I know better.
You can download and install FIGlet from http://figlet.org, but if you’re using a package manager you’ll probably find there’s a port for it.
I use Darwin Ports on OSX and installation was trivial:
$ port install figlet
Once FIGlet has been downloaded and installed, start it up by typing figlet at the CLI and then type whatever you want. Alternatively, pipe a file or the output of another command through FIGlet, or put your input right on the command line as an argument.
$ figlet Hello World!
Now, go get working on your signature.
