Linux Candy: nyancat – Terminal-based Pop Tart Cat Animation

Last Updated on May 25, 2022

In Operation

nyancat uses various ANSI escape sequences to render color. It tries to autodetect the terminal size.

Here’s a short video showing the animation in action. In the title bar, there’s a phrase “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya…” The Japanese word nyan is onomatopoeic, imitating the call of a cat (equivalent to English “meow”).

There’s a running timer that shows how long nyancat has been running.

There are various command line flags available.

Here are the main ones:

• -i – shows the introduction information at startup.
• -t – telnet mode. openbsd-inetd is recommended but xinetd and systemd, or any other compatible inetd work.
• -n – removes the timer.
• -s – doesn’t set the titlebar text.
• -e – doesn’t clear the display between frames.
• -d – delay image rendering from 10ms to 1000ms.
• -f – display the requested number of frames, and then exit.
• -r, -R, -c, -C, -W, -H, crops the animation.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary