Lesson 107: toilet Command
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use the toilet command to generate large ASCII art text banners in your terminal - with different fonts, colors, effects, and filters and how to use it practically in scripts, shell greetings, and system status displays.
The toilet command (short for This One Is Like FIGlet, but Toileted) is a text banner generator that renders plain text into large stylized characters using font files.
It is a spiritual successor to the older figlet command, with added support for Unicode characters, UTF-8 output, color filters, and terminal effects that figlet lacks.
Font files are stored in /usr/share/toilet/ and /usr/share/figlet/ — toilet can use both its own fonts and any figlet-compatible font files.
Installation
sudo apt install toilet # Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
Or:
sudo dnf install toilet # Fedora/RHEL 9+
Or:
sudo yum install toilet # RHEL/CentOS 7/8
Or:
sudo pacman -S toilet # Arch Linux
Or:
sudo apk add toilet # Alpine Linux
Or:
sudo zypper install toilet # OpenSUSE
Or:
sudo emerge -a sys-apps/toilet # Gentoo Linux
Syntax
toilet [OPTIONS] [TEXT]
Or pipe text into toilet:
echo "TEXT" | toilet [OPTIONS]
Options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
-f <font> |
Specify the font to use |
-F <filter> |
Apply a visual filter (color or effect) |
-w <width> |
Set the output width in characters (default: terminal width) |
-t |
Use the terminal width automatically |
-k |
Use kerning mode — tighter character spacing |
-W |
Use full-width Unicode characters |
-S |
Smush characters together (overlap where possible) |
-E <charset> |
Set the output charset |
-d <dir> |
Look for fonts in a custom directory |
--html |
Output HTML instead of plain text |
--irc |
Output IRC color codes |
--gay |
Apply the gay color filter (rainbow) |
--metal |
Apply the metal color filter (gray/metallic) |