7 Terminal Commands That Will Just Make You Smile

These tutorials don’t always have to be practical

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash.

Shell command is a powerful tool for improving a developer’s productivity. There are also some really funny command tools that will make you smile after a long day of work.

You can play word games in terminals, create a beautiful ASCII picture, and more. Let’s have a look.

1. sl

This isn’t a typo. The command is indeed sl.

$ sudo apt-get install sl  # Linux
$ brew install sl          # MacOs

If you run it, you will see a train coming from right to left. The result looks like this:

2. fortune

$ sudo apt-get install fortune  # Linux
$ brew install fortune          # MacOs

fortune will display quotes, funny predictions, jokes, or even poetry in the terminal.

You can find more details on fortune’s webpage.

3. cowsay

$ sudo apt-get install cowsay  # Linux
$ brew install cowsay          # MacOs
$ cowsay hello

cowsay will display a cow with the words you input as arguments.

It’s funnier to combine it with fortune through a pipeline:

4. toilet

toilet can be used to make a beautiful ASCII picture with your inputs. All kinds of colors are available.

5. oneko

oneko is my favorite command on this list. The program will show cats that chase your mouse cursor, as seen in this video. I couldn’t find a version for macOS.

$ sudo apt-get install oneko  # Linux