Ciglet: Figlet Comment Blocks

I often use FIGlet in code comments; if a file I'm working on is particulary large and hairy, big comments can provide useful visual landmarks as you scroll around.

I also like to leave myself a big old temporary

//  _____ ___  ____   ___  
// |_   _/ _ \|  _ \ / _ \ 
//   | || | | | | | | | | |
//   | || |_| | |_| | |_| |
//   |_| \___/|____/ \___/

at the end of the day with some notes about where I left off.

You can easily pipe figlet's output to the pasteboard on MacOS like:

% figlet TODO | pbcopy

...but got tired enough of typing | pbcopy, pasting, and then having to select the newly pasted text and comment it out that I hacked together a Bash script that wraps the figlet command and:

Accepts an additional initial -a argument (a for add) for the comment character you want to use (Defaults to //)
Passes any additional arguments directly to figlet
Pipes the output of figlet into sed to add the comment prefix to each line
Pipes the output of that onto the pasteboard so you can just paste it into your editor. (It also prints it to STDOUT.)

#!/bin/bash

#    _______       __     __ 
#   / ____(_)___ _/ /__  / /_
#  / /   / / __ `/ / _ \/ __/
# / /___/ / /_/ / /  __/ /_  
# \____/_/\__, /_/\___/\__/  
#        /____/              
#
# Figlet Code Comments (MacOS)

# Default prefix
prefix="//"

# Check for -a option first
if [[ "$1" == "-a" && -n "$2" ]]; then
    prefix="$2"
    shift 2
fi

# Escape the prefix for sed
escaped_prefix=$(echo "$prefix" | sed 's/[\/&]/\\&/g')

# Run figlet with all remaining arguments, add prefix, and send to both stdout and pbcopy
figlet "$@" | sed "s/^/$escaped_prefix /" | tee >(pbcopy) 
echo ""
echo "(Copied to clipboard)"

If you save it to an executable file called ciglet somewhere in your PATH, you can run:

ciglet -a '#' -f slant 'Hello, World!'

and you should see

#     __  __     ____           _       __           __    ____
#    / / / /__  / / /___       | |     / /___  _____/ /___/ / /
#   / /_/ / _ \/ / / __ \      | | /| / / __ \/ ___/ / __  / / 
#  / __  /  __/ / / /_/ /      | |/ |/ / /_/ / /  / / /_/ /_/  
# /_/ /_/\___/_/_/\____( )     |__/|__/\____/_/  /_/\__,_(_)   
#                      |/                                      

(Copied to clipboard)

Thu Feb 20 2025 19:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)