Linux Candy: shuffle – ASCII art with a cool shuffle effect

Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands!!

Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only featuring open-source software in this series.

If you spend all day embroiled in political in-fighting, battling red tape nonsense, coding an innovative program in Python, sit in countless meetings wishing you were relaxing on a Caribbean island, you’ll need some light relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your Linux desktop a little more fun.

The shuffle command prints an ASCII art picture with a cool shuffle effect.

Installation

I evaluated shuffle with the Manjaro and Ubuntu distributions. For Manjaro, there’s a package in the Arch User Repository.

In Operation

Generating the picture with a shuffle effect is simple. Supply the shuffle command with a text file and a few parameters.

I’ve used a slow speed of 150 so that the animation lasts a little longer.

$ shuffle -s 150 -c yellow -e blocks rabbit_carrot

You can also shuffle any text file, even if it contains Unicode characters.

Available options:

• -s speed: 1 fast to 500 very slow.
• -c color: Must be in the format “r;g;b” or one of the standard colors: red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, orange, white, black, grey, or just “random”.
• -e effect: Random(standard), spiral, wipe, snake, blocks

Summary

shuffle is just a harmless bit of fun. But you can produce some cool effects.

Even the help option is animated.

Website: github.com/lennart1978/shuffle
Support:
Developer: Lennart Martens
License: MIT License

shuffle is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Complete list of articles in this series: