asciiquarium

asciiquarium is a script that doubles as a cool screensaver for the terminal.

To start asciiquarium, simply type the following:

$ asciiquarium

Examples of asciiquarium

Using ascii art, asciiquarium gives the terminal the feel of being out at sea with fish swimming around and the occasional fisherman.

asciiquarium is not built-in to your terminal and in order to use it, you have to install it to your machine.

If you are using a linux machine, do the following steps:

$ wget http://www.robobunny.com/projects/asciiquarium/asciiquarium.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf asciiquarium.tar.gz
$ cd asciiquarium_1.1/
$ chmod +x asciiquarium
$ sudo cp asciiquarium /usr/local/bin/asciiquarium
$ sudo cpan Term::Animation
$ asciiquarium

For Mac users, there’s a nice packaged version that will run out of the box, courtesy of Chuck Houpt:

https://habilis.net/macasciiquarium/

Useful Commands

• r - redo the art
• q - quit the program
• p - pause the program