This tutorial explains how you can install Figlet directly from source code on macOS. Tested on macOS 10.9.5.

Installing Figlet via official source code archive.

First grab a compressed archive from an official Figlet source site:

curl -O -L ftp://ftp.figlet.org/pub/figlet/program/unix/figlet-2.2.5.tar.gz

Next, decompress the archive like this:

tar -xf figlet-2.*.tar.gz

Now go into the decompressed directory:

cd figlet-*

Run make:

make

And finally install it by running sudo make install:

sudo make install

And once it’s installed, run the command like this to do a simple check to see it’s working:

figlet Hello!

And the output should be something like this:

 _   _      _ _       _
| | | | ___| | | ___ | |
| |_| |/ _ \ | |/ _ \| |
|  _  |  __/ | | (_) |_|
|_| |_|\___|_|_|\___/(_)

Basic usage and cool tricks.

To see all of the Figlet fonts installed on the system run this command:

showfigfonts

And to select another font to use, just use the -f flag like this:

figlet -f slant Hello!

This example uses slant font and the output would be something like this:

    __  __     ____      __
   / / / /__  / / /___  / /
  / /_/ / _ \/ / / __ \/ /
 / __  /  __/ / / /_/ /_/
/_/ /_/\___/_/_/\____(_)

Uninstall

Uninstall Figlet by running these commands:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/figlet
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/{figlet,chkfont,figlist,showfigfonts}
sudo rm -f /usr/local/man/man6/{figlet.6,chkfont.6,figlist.6,showfigfonts.6}