Making old school text banners with a Raspberry Pi

When I was in high school, I took a co-op course that involved working as a computer operator in exchange for credits.

One of my duties was to change the paper on the computer terminal. What's that? Well imagine a Keyboard hooked up to a mini computer (a very large computer actually) but with no screen, just a printer.

Everything you type comes out on the paper, including passwords. That made for great dumpster diving back in the day, but that is for another day.

I remember people using these terminals to print out text banners. I use the same style for my own code to break apart different areas of my programs.

Making a text banner

I use Figlet from the command line on one of my Raspberry Pi computers, which are running Raspbian. Figlet is likely available for all flavors of Linux.

Install Figlet on a Raspberry Pi

What I love about Linux is how simple it is to install a desired component.

I connect to my Raspberry Pi with Kitty (An SSH client, a fork of Putty) and run the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install figlet

Then I run "figlet BlahBlah" to generate a banner. Copying and pasting from an SSH window is super easy. Then I paste it into Visual Studio Code and format it a bit.

That's it. Enjoy figgling.