How to Create ASCII Art with FIGlet: History, Tools, and Node.js Examples

What is FIGlet

FIGlet is a utility that renders text as ASCII‑art banners. It converts ordinary strings into stylized, multi‑line representations using a collection of predefined fonts.

History

The original C program, called newban, was released in spring 1991 and later renamed FIGlet 1.0 with a single lowercase font. In 1993 the code was rewritten, adding 13 fonts and documentation, resulting in FIGlet 2.0. Subsequent releases introduced non‑ASCII support, right‑to‑left printing and other enhancements. The latest stable release is version 2.2.5, available from the official site: http://www.figlet.org/.

Generating FIGlet Art

Online Generators

Web‑based converters such as picascii.com and patorjk.com/software/taag allow you to paste text and obtain a FIGlet‑style banner without installing anything.

Editor Extensions

Popular code editors provide plugins that invoke FIGlet directly:

Sublime Text – install the “FIGlet” package.

Visual Studio Code – install the “VSC Figlet” extension and trigger it via the command palette (⌘+Shift+P) by typing “VSC Figlet”.

Atom – similar extensions are available in the package manager.

These extensions let you select a font and insert the generated banner into the current file.

Node.js Package

FIGlet is available as an npm package that provides both a library API and a command‑line interface.

Installation npm install figlet Library usage example

var figlet = require('figlet');

figlet('FIGlet Demo', function(err, data) {
    if (err) {
        console.error('Error:', err);
        return;
    }
    console.log(data);
});

The code prints an ASCII banner to the console.

CLI usage

npm install -g figlet-cli
figlet "Athena"

The command outputs a stylized banner for the supplied word.

Browser Integration

For client‑side conversion you can include figlet.js together with a fetch polyfill.

<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/fetch/1.0.0/fetch.min.js"></script>
<script src="figlet.js"></script>

<script>
    figlet(inputText, 'Standard', function(err, text) {
        if (err) {
            console.error('Error:', err);
            return;
        }
        console.log(text);
    });
</script>

Common Applications

Displaying decorative banners in Chrome DevTools console.

Separating sections in long source files within editors that support side‑by‑side views.

Adding visual flair to plain‑text emails.

Creating login or status messages in terminal sessions.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIGlet

https://www.npmjs.com/package/figlet

http://patorjk.com/software/taag

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art

http://www.figlet.org/