Working in SSH all day doesn’t always have to be serious. Over the years, Unix developers have built some wonderful, nostalgic terminal toys to blow off steam.
Here are 7 fun terminal utilities worth running in your shell:
1. AsciiAquarium (Personal Favourite)
An animated sea-aquarium rendered entirely in ASCII art, complete with swimming fish, sharks, ducks, and swaying seaweed.
# Install Perl animation dependencies and run
cpan Term::Animation
wget https://www.robobunny.com/projects/asciiquarium/asciiquarium.tar.gz
tar -zxvf asciiquarium.tar.gz && cd asciiquarium_1.1/
chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/asciiquarium
./asciiquarium(Note: I loved this utility so much that I later recreated an interactive version in Go and HTML for retro browser experiments!)
2. Steam Locomotive (sl)
For those times you accidentally type sl instead of ls:
yum install sl -y # or apt install sl
slA steam train will chug across your terminal window from right to left.
3. Star Wars Episode IV over Telnet
Watch the entire original Star Wars movie recreated in ASCII animation:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl4. Burning ASCII Flames (aafire)
Turn your console into a roaring retro fireplace:
yum install aalib -y # or apt install libaa-bin
aafire5. Figlet Live Terminal Clock
A continuous ASCII banner clock updating every second:
while true; do echo "$(date '+%D %T' | figlet)"; sleep 1; clear; done6. Reverse String (rev)
Reverses every character line-by-line:
rev <<< "Welcome to DanFry.net"
# Output: ten.yrfnaD ot emocleW7. Classic Fortune
Random epigrams, quotes, and wisdom directly in your shell:
fortune