Install figlet with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• chkfont
• figlet
• figlist
• showfigfonts

Project history

FIGlet's own history traces the project to Spring 1991, when Glenn Chappell wrote a small C program called newban after seeing an email signature by Frank Sheeran and being encouraged by Ian Chai. Later hindsight treats that 170-line program as FIGlet 1.0.

In early 1993, Chappell and Chai rewrote and expanded the program into FIGlet 2.0 with full ASCII support, documentation, and 13 fonts. The official history says it then spread rapidly across the net, bringing fan mail, contributed fonts, ports to non-Unix systems, bug reports, a mailing list, and FTP hosting.

FIGlet 2.1 added non-ASCII character sets and right-to-left printing. Later stewardship moved to the figlet.org community; an editor's note records the 2005 release of 2.2.2 under the Academic Free License, the 2011 release of 2.2.3 under the New BSD License, and a font collection exceeding 400 contributed fonts.

Adoption history

FIGlet became part of terminal and Unix culture because it made banners, email signatures, Usenet decorations, shell prompts, release scripts, and demos easy to generate from plain text. The man page explicitly connects FIGlet output to signatures in email and Usenet messages and to banner-style programs.

The supplied package metadata shows broad packaging across Unix-like and cross-platform managers, including Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, MacPorts, Nix, Scoop, and openSUSE. That breadth matches FIGlet's role as a tiny, stable, instantly recognizable CLI.

How it is used

The man page describes the common usage pattern: run figlet interactively, pipe a file or command output into it, or pass text on the command line. Users can select fonts with -f, set the font directory with -d, control output width and justification, and use compressed font or control files.

The practical unit of extension is the FIGlet font file, usually using the .flf suffix. That made the program easy to package with a base font set while allowing communities to trade and install many additional fonts.

Why package nerds care

FIGlet is package-nerd significant because it is a tiny command that became a shared visual language for terminals. Its output appears in build logs, MOTDs, READMEs, demos, shell scripts, and joke packages, and its font format made it unusually portable across Unix and non-Unix systems.

It also represents an early internet-era open-source distribution pattern: a small C utility, an FTP site, mailing-list traffic, ports, contributed assets, licensing cleanup, and eventual packaging everywhere.

Timeline

• 1991: Glenn Chappell writes newban, later regarded as FIGlet 1.0.
• 1993: FIGlet 2.0 is released with full ASCII support, documentation, and 13 fonts.
• 1990s: FIGlet spreads online, attracting ports, bug reports, and regular contributed fonts.
• 2002: Ian Chai hands figlet.org administration to Christiaan Keet.
• 2005: FIGlet 2.2.2 is released under the Academic Free License 2.1.
• 2011: FIGlet 2.2.3 is released under the New BSD License.

Related projects

• FIGlet is related to older banner programs, terminal ASCII-art tools, font collections using the FLF format, and later compatible tools such as TOIlet.

Sources

• http://www.figlet.org/figlet_history.html
• http://www.figlet.org/figlet-man.html
• http://www.figlet.org/