GitHub - maebert/botsay: Cowsay for the AI era

Like cowsay, but with cute little robots.

$ botsay -s 7 "Hello! I'm a little robot."
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ Hello! I'm a little robot. │
╰────────────────────────────╯
    ╲
     ╲
       ▗▙▟▖
       █▐▌█
      ▐▐██▌▌
       ▗▌▐▖

Every robot is generated from a seed, and the same seed always draws the same robot in the same color. Here are the first nine:

0           1           2           3           4           5           6           7           8
  ▙▟         ▗▟▄▙▖       ▗▟▄▙▖        ▄▙▟▄       ▗██▖       ▐████▌       ▗▄▟▙▄▖      ▗▙▟▖       ▗▟▄▙▖
▗▟▐▌▙▖       █▛█▜█      ▗▟▟█▙▙▖     ▗▟▜██▛▙▖    ▗▟▜▛▙▖      ▟▀██▀▙       █▙▟▙▟█      █▐▌█       ▐█▀█▌
▐▝██▘▌      ▐▐███▌▌     ▐▐▙▄▟▌▌     ▐▝████▘▌    ▐▝██▘▌      ▜████▛      ▐▐████▌▌    ▐▐██▌▌      ▐███▌
  ▌▐         ▐▜▀▛▌        ▐ ▌                                            ▝▛▛▜▜▘      ▗▌▐▖        ▟ ▙

Installation

With Homebrew on macOS or Linux:

brew install maebert/tap/botsay

Or from source, with a Rust toolchain (1.85 or newer):

cargo install --git https://github.com/maebert/botsay

Homebrew also installs botthink, which draws thought balloons. With Cargo, make it yourself: ln -s ~/.cargo/bin/botsay ~/.cargo/bin/botthink.

Usage

botsay hello                  # a random robot says hello
botsay -s manu hello          # the robot for seed "manu" says hello
fortune | botsay              # read the message from stdin
botthink "hmm..."             # a thought balloon instead
botsay -o -s manu             # just the robot
botsay -c blue hello          # a blue robot
botsay --gallery 27           # browse the robots for seeds 0 to 26

Your own robot

Set BOTSAY_SEED in your shell profile to always get the same robot:

export BOTSAY_SEED="$USER"

Colors

The seed picks each robot's color: a hue anywhere on the color wheel, with a saturation and lightness picked for dark terminals. On a light background some of the paler robots are hard to see; -c or -n helps there. Only the robot is colored, not the balloon.

-c overrides it with:

• a hue in degrees, like -c 200, which keeps the seed's saturation and lightness;
• a name for a hue: red, orange, yellow, lime, green, teal, cyan, blue, indigo, purple, magenta or pink;
• an exact hex color, like -c ff8800 or -c '#f80' (quote it, since # starts a comment in most shells).

Colors are only printed to a terminal, so botsay hi > file.txt stays plain. They use 24-bit color if the terminal sets COLORTERM=truecolor, and the 256-color palette otherwise. botsay also follows the usual conventions: NO_COLOR turns colors off, and CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 turns them on even when the output isn't a terminal.

Balloon styles

The style names follow ponysay's:

ascii         cowsay        linux-vt       round           unicode
+------+       ______       ╔══════╗       ╭──────╮        ┌──────┐
| beep |      < beep >      ║ beep ║       │ beep │        │ beep │
+------+       ------       ╚══════╝       ╰──────╯        └──────┘
    \             \             \              ╲               ╲

botthink uses o or ○ for the trail, and ( ) sides for the cowsay style.

Development

cargo test                                   # UPDATE_SNAPSHOTS=1 to accept changes
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --check

Releasing

1. Bump version in Cargo.toml, move the changelog entries under a new heading for that version, and add its link at the bottom of the changelog.
2. Commit, then tag and push: git tag v0.2.0 && git push origin v0.2.0.

The release workflow runs the tests, checks that the tag matches Cargo.toml, builds binaries for macOS and Linux, publishes a GitHub Release, and updates the formula in maebert/homebrew-tap from .github/formula.rb.in.

Known limitations

• Message widths are counted in characters, so wide characters like CJK or emoji make the right edge of the balloon uneven.
• The robots need a font with the Unicode quadrant block characters. Almost every modern terminal font has them.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license, at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.