FIGlet (originally called newban;
Q1388579
on Wikidata) is the name of an old-school but
cute computer program that can be ran via your
terminal that will take ASCII art fonts and
generates them into text banners.
For example, if a person were to run a command like
figlet -f drummy Hello!, then this tells their computer to
open up figlet, use the drummy font
(-f drummy) and to write Hello!, so we get an
output that looks like this:
mdk@wikk:~$ figlet -f drummy Hello!
_ _ _ _ _
| | | | ___ | || | ___ | |
| '-' | / _ \ | || | / _ \|_|
| .-. || ___)| || |( (_) )_
|_| |_| \___] \_\\_\ \___/(_)There are a lot of default fonts found in the FIGlet program, like ones based on the Doom logo, a USA flag one, space-themed ones, and others that you can find for yourself.
The name FIGlet is actually a bit of an acronym, standing for Frank [Sheeran], Ian [Chai] and Glenn [Chappell]'s letters, although it appears that Frank Sheeran was more of an inspiration to start the work on FIGlet rather than actually working on it after Ian Chai and Glenn Chappell were inspired after seeing his E-Mail signature. Work on the program started off in 1991 under the name of newban (retroactively called FIGlet 1.0), as written in C, although it only had one font that was in lowercase.
The original source code for newban was actually deleted, having to be sent to Glenn Chappell as he didn't feel it was worth living on his computer.
1993 saw the real start of FIGlet 2.0 after 7 months of work, with 888 lines of code and 13 fonts.
The FIGlet program uses .flf files. These are actually
quite useful, as each one contains all the individual given font in what
is basically a plain text file. This also means, with any given text
editor, you can change how a font looks like.
Making your own font isn't hard, and in fact, it's actually fun and relaxing to work on.
This page was last edited on 2026-09-09 02:57:02.
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