cursive

Figlet, a program to make large letters out of ordinary text was featured in Lobsters and it reminded me of cursive, a similar program that we used back when ASCII art was the only decoration one could add to their email signature. And since it seems that cursive is not carried by any Linux distribution, I set out to find the sources. Which I did thanks to FreeBSD.

I downloaded the source and tried to compile it, and it required xstr. Yet another old program! I think the last time one can see it, is OpenBSD-5.5 manual. I mean even the 5.6 changelog writes:

“mkstr was intended for the limited architecture of the PDP 11 family.” Time moves on, memory gets cheaper. There’s no need for mkstr or xstr.

Hacks like xstr and mkstr might be of interest to embedded, or otherwise deprived, systems people as cool hacks and peculiarities, but really no actual need to maintain them.

So I set out to make the cursive source compilable with xstr again (it compiles without it just fine, just type make lcursive instead). And the minimally changed source code, to eradicate compiler warnings, of a program that can happily sign your email since 1985 is now on Github:

• https://github.com/a-yiorgos/cursive

   __
  /  `
 /--   ____  o ____  ,
(___, / / (_/_(_) (_/___
           /       /
         -'       '

Shoutouts to my good friend Panagiotis C. who was the person who showed me cursive and figlet some 25 years ago or so.