Gnusay

Release your inner gnu!
Gnusay 1.2.1 has been released. Get it here.

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The pasture...

(This is sort of a news-section. If you want to know what gnusay actually *is*, read below.)

I don't do much work on Gnusay these days (why change perfection?), but Gnusay 1.3 will probably have better support for Unicode, and I've been thinking about a few other nifty things. If you're fortunate enough to be a dane, you can read about my life on my blog.

What the heck?

Gnusay is a program that prints talking gnus on a terminal.
In the style of cowsay, this program basically prints gnus of various appearance on the screen. The gnus are described using an intuitive syntax, and a host of command line parameters are provided to fine-tune the final appearance of the gnu. Gnusay is far bigger than cowsay, but runs noticeably faster. It is a full replacement for cowsay, which appears to be dead (and written in Perl, which is just as bad). Gnusay has support for cowsay cowfiles, as long as they aren't overly complex (ie. they must use a very strict subset of Perl).

Umm... right

Gnusay is written in modern ISO C++ (which makes it very fast), and makes extensive use of the standard libraries. Gnusay also has a hard dependency on Boost v1.32, and a working installation of this library is required for both building and running the application. If you, for some reason, do not desire to have this wonderful library installed, the 1.1 branch of Gnusay, which does not require Boost, can still be obtained from the download page. The current version of Gnusay is 1.2. This is a stable release, pretty fast and very solid. It is considerably more solid than older releases. The number of provided characters is quite low when compared to cowsay (if you have a desire to create ASCII figures, please contact me!)
Here is a screenshot of gnusay in action:

  __ _ _ __  _   _ ___  __ _ _   _  / | |___ \ 
 / _` | '_ \| | | / __|/ _` | | | | | |   __) |
| (_| | | | | |_| \__ \ (_| | |_| | | |_ / __/ 
 \__, |_| |_|\__,_|___/\__,_|\__, | |_(_)_____|
 |___/                       |___/             
                  _________________________
                 < Release your inner gnu! >
                  -------------------------
                    \
                     \ (\..../)__
                        \ oo /   \_____
                         |  |          )
                         |__|         /*
                          ""||------||
                            ||      ||
                  __________||______||________       
                                                                
 

So...

A lot of exciting features are planned for future releases of Gnusay. Among these are:

• Better cowsay cowfile compatability.
• More sophisticated variable facilities.
• Support for .gnusayrc files.
• Separate lexers for cowfiles and gnufiles.
• More gnus. (Partially moot due to cowsay cowfile compatability)
• Run-time speed enhancements. (This one won't go away)

Yes, the future does indeed look bright for the application realm of text-based gnus!

Moo!

If you have any awesome ideas as to what features a program such as gnusay should support, please, contact me.

Visit project page for downloads.

Troels Henriksen -- athas@sigkill.dk