cacafire

Display the ASCII fire

$ cacafire

cacafire

cacafire is a fascinating command-line utility that renders a dynamic, colorful fire animation directly within your terminal. It is a prime demonstration of the capabilities of libcaca, a graphics library that aims to output text instead of pixels.

Unlike traditional graphics libraries, libcaca converts graphical primitives into ASCII art, block characters, or other text-based representations, making cacafire a unique visual experience. The animation continuously generates a flickering flame effect, using a variety of characters and ANSI color codes to simulate heat and movement.

It's widely used for amusement, as a screensaver, or simply to showcase the graphical prowess achievable within a text-only environment. While primarily an entertainment tool, it also serves as an excellent test of a terminal emulator's color and character rendering capabilities. It runs continuously until interrupted (e.g., by Ctrl+C).

Resource Intensive: cacafire can be CPU-intensive, especially on older systems or when running in less optimized terminal emulators, due to its continuous rendering of complex ASCII art.

Color Support Required: Requires a terminal emulator that supports ANSI color escape codes (VT100 compatible) to display the fire animation correctly and vibrantly. Without proper color support, the output will appear monochrome or garbled.

Library Dependency: Relies on the libcaca library being installed on the system.

Terminal Compatibility: Performance and visual quality may vary across different terminal emulators.

The cacafire command runs indefinitely, continuously rendering the fire animation. To stop the animation and return to the command prompt, press Ctrl+C. This sends an interrupt signal (SIGINT) to the process.

While not a traditional utility, cacafire serves as a delightful example of creative programming. It's often used for fun, as a terminal background, or to impress others with the graphical capabilities of the command line interface, proving that even a text-only environment can be visually dynamic.

cacafire is an iconic demonstration program from the libcaca project, initiated by Sam Hocevar. The libcaca library itself was conceived as a "Color ASCII Art library", designed to output graphics as character art rather than pixels. Developed to provide a cross-platform, efficient way to render graphical content in text mode, cacafire quickly became a beloved example of its capabilities. Its development reflects a unique niche in open-source software, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in a traditional command-line interface.

libcaca(7), caca-utils(1), aalib(7), asciiquarium(1), pipes(6)