Figlet-style ASCII Banner

FIGlet banners: ASCII typography, fonts, and where to use them

FIGlet — an acronym of Frank, Ian and Glenn's LETters — is a tiny Unix utility that prints text as large ASCII-art letters. It was written in 1991 by Frank Sheeran, Ian Chai, Glenn Chappell, and Christopher Matthews, in part to recreate the playful bulletin-board signature blocks of the early 1990s. The format proved so useful for splash banners that it now ships in every major Linux distribution, in Homebrew, in Windows via WSL, and is bundled inside countless CLI tools as a "welcome screen" engine. Run figlet "Hello" and you instantly get a six-line ASCII rendering of the word.

This generator emits a FIGlet-style banner in your browser. Below you will find a reference on the .flf font format, the most common fonts shipped with the standard distribution, the CLI flags you actually need, how FIGlet compares to toilet, cowsay, boxes, and lolcat, and the modern Unicode-block art techniques that go beyond pure ASCII.

Fonts: the .flf format and the standard library

A FIGlet font is a plain-text file with the extension .flf describing each printable character as a multi-line ASCII glyph. The default install ships about a hundred fonts under /usr/share/figlet/fonts/ (or /opt/homebrew/share/figlet/fonts/ on Apple Silicon). Popular choices:

• standard — the historic default, balanced size and readability.
• slant, shadow, 3-d, 3D Diagonal — decorative variants.
• big, banner, block — wide letterforms for headers.
• mini, small, thin — compact fonts that fit in narrow terminals.
• ANSI Shadow, Doom, Bloody, Speed, Star Wars, Univers, Crawford, Cosmike, Cybermedium — modern stylised picks loved on GitHub READMEs.

List everything available on your machine with figlist, and preview a font with figlet -f shadow "Sample".

The CLI flags you actually use

figlet -f slant "Hello"        # pick a font
figlet -w 80 "Long heading"    # max width 80 columns
figlet -c "Centered"           # centre the output
figlet -l "Left"               # left-justify (default)
figlet -r "Right"              # right-justify
figlet -t "Auto width"         # use terminal width
figlet -k "Smush kerning"      # use the font's kerning rules
figlet -W "Wide spacing"       # full character width (no smushing)
figlet -R "RTL"                # right-to-left order (for Hebrew/Arabic font sets)
figlet -d /path/to/fonts "X"   # alternative font directory

TOIlet, cowsay, boxes, lolcat — the wider ecosystem

• toilet — drop-in replacement that adds UTF-8 input, true colour, and filter effects: toilet -t -F border --gay "Hello" produces a bordered rainbow banner.
• cowsay — wraps text in an ASCII speech bubble next to a cow (or any of dozens of "cowfiles" including Tux, dragons, Snoopy).
• boxes — draws a customisable ASCII frame around stdin, useful for commenting code in many styles.
• lolcat — pipes anything through a rainbow gradient: figlet Hello | lolcat.
• banner — the original BSD utility that inspired FIGlet, single huge font, still on most systems.
• neofetch / fastfetch — system info dumps that print a distribution logo plus FIGlet-style headers.

Going beyond ASCII: Unicode block characters

Pure ASCII is limited to printable codepoints 0x20-0x7E. For "high-resolution" art, modern terminals render the Unicode Block Elements range (U+2580-U+259F) — characters such as ▀ ▄ █ ▌ ▐ ░ ▒ ▓ that paint half-cells and quarter-cells. Combining these with truecolor escape sequences allows photographs to be rendered as terminal art via tools like chafa, jp2a, and img2txt. Unicode 13 added the even denser Symbols for Legacy Computing block (U+1FB00-U+1FBFF), giving sixths-of-a-cell resolution.

Real-world uses

• README banners on GitHub for project name and version.
• SSH login MOTD on servers, sometimes piped through lolcat for fun.
• Splash screens for CLI tools (kubectl, terraform, custom internal scripts).
• Docker container ENTRYPOINT prints — quick visual confirmation that the right image is running.
• CTF challenge flag formats, ASCII signatures in plain-text emails, retro BBS-style art.

FAQ

Where can I run FIGlet without installing it? Browser-based generators like figlet.tools, patorjk.com/software/taag, and asciiconvert.com produce the same output. This page does too — type and the banner appears.

What if my text is too long to fit? Pass -w 200 (or whatever your terminal width is) to widen the output; FIGlet hard-wraps onto new lines past the limit. For very long inputs, a smaller font like mini often fits better than wrapping standard.

Are there coloured FIGlet fonts? Not in vanilla FIGlet — the format only encodes monochrome glyphs. Use toilet for built-in colours and filters, or pipe the output through lolcat for a rainbow gradient.

How do I install extra fonts? Download .flf files from sources like the patorjk catalogue or the FIGlet font archive and drop them into the fonts directory (figlet -I2 prints the path). Then figlet -f newfont.

Can FIGlet handle non-Latin scripts? The format only supports the original printable ASCII range, so Cyrillic, Greek, CJK, etc. need toilet with a TrueType font (toilet -F crop --filter border --font DejaVuSans) or one of the modern Unicode-aware alternatives.