Using sixels in cowsay utility

[PhMajerus]

cowsay is a classic terminal utility to show messages as a speech bubble with a character. Extra characters can be installed using .cow files.

I wanted to make the default cow more attractive by replacing the dated ASCII-art version with a pixel-art one, taking advantage of the new sixel images support in Windows Terminal 1.22.

So here is the whole process to backup the original ASCII-art cow to legacy-cow, downloading sxl-cow from my new CowFiles repository, and setting it as the default character for the cowsay utility.

Here are the commands used:

cd /usr/share/cowsay/cows
sudo mv default.cow legacy-cow.cow
sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PhMajerus/CowFiles/main/cows/sxl-cow.cow -o sxl-cow.cow
sudo ln -s sxl-cow.cow default.cow

While you're there, you can also check out the other characters ("cows") in that repository to find out how to use colors and Unicode 16.0 octants in cowsay.

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Note this requires a version of Windows Terminal that supports sixels. At the time of this writing, that means Windows Terminal Preview 1.22.2362.0, as the non-preview version is still on 1.20 which does not support sixels.

[PhMajerus]

Another example of sixel in cowsay, showing the full resolution of a sixel image in 256 colors: