lolcat: From the ears to the eyes

That last note about jdkdrum was missing a visual element, so I hope this one — lolcat — makes up for it.

From what I’ve seen, that’s about all that lolcat does — paints your emulator output in rainbows. Not that it’s less than expected, only that it might disappoint the terrifically serious types in the audience.

But that does mean it’s really just a cat tool … with the obvious addition of lol. 😉

There are a few options available to lolcat, and they either enhance or control the rainbow output that you see up there. There’s also an --animate flag that will cause each line to pulse through a rainbow before moving to the next … sort of like the old Atari computers used as video output. If you remember those days. 😕

I should mention that lolcat’s output is quite different from toilet‘s “fabulous” mode; if you look closely at the respective screenshots, you can see that each character in toilet’s output has a single color.

But lolcat is painting its output across individual characters, which is rather interesting. 🙂 lolcat will work in a virtual console, but you don’t get the same smooth rainbow effect. In fact, lolcat in a vc performs a lot more like toilet does.

lolcat is in AUR and is listed as on-deck for Debian Jessie, but both versions seem to come with a wicked mesh of ruby dependencies. If you’re expecting to just throw this on your old 300Mhz Pentium II laptop and start lolcatting news updates from across the web, there will be some patience required.

Ah, but the final product will be worth it, don’t you think?