Last Updated on April 18, 2024
Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands! Both feet too if you’re sufficiently pliant.
Linux Candy is a new series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only going to feature open-source software in this series.
I’m not going to harp on about the tired proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. But there’s a certain element of truth here. If you spend all day coding neural networks, mastering a new programming language, sit in meetings feeling bored witless, you’ll need some relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more memorable.
The nights are drawing in (at least in the Northern hemisphere). You want to feel warm and toasty. And nothing beats a log fire. cacafire displays burning ASCII art flames.
cacafire using libcaca, a cross-platform graphics library that outputs text instead of pixels, so that it works on older video cards or text terminals. There’s support for 2048 colors, dithering of color images, advanced text canvas operations (blitting, rotations), and Unicode support. libcaca has been used in a variety of programs, including FFmpeg, VLC media player, and MPlayer
Installation
There’s packages for libcaca available under major Linux distributions.
So head over to your package manager and install libcaca, if it’s not already present on your system.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – cacademo
Page 4 – Summary