Animated ASCII Christmas Tree and Hanukkah Menorah in your Shell

Because your Terminal deserves to feel festive during the holidays.

I’m a big fan of ASCII and ANSI style art — dating back to the BBS days of the 1980s and 90s. So it’s no surprise that I enjoy sprucing up my Linux terminal with ASCII animations from time to time.

Well, it just so happens that this week is Hanukkah. And, when I went looking for Hanukkah themed ASCII animations for Linux (or other platforms)… I came up completely empty handed.

So, I did what any red-blooded nerd would do: I whipped up my own Bash script and put it up on GitHub.

Nothing fancy or crazy. Just a simple menorah that counts the 8 nights and lights a little ASCII candle for each one. It even correctly lights the Shamash candle first.

But then I thought… why not add in some Christmas goodness as well?

So I looked around, and found an adorable animated Christmas tree BASH script that had colored lights flickering. And, since it was released into the Public Domain, I went ahead and added that animation to my script as an option (with credit to the original author, of course). Because… why not?

I’ve gone ahead and released it under the GPLv2, for everyone to enjoy, as “LundukeHoliday.sh”.

Installation is doggone simple. Just download it (it’s one file) and run it.

It’s written in pure Bash. So it should work on any system (Linux or otherwise) with the Bash Shell. Having a color terminal is highly recommended but, honestly, it’s still pretty cool in a mono terminal.

Usage, likewise, is darn simple. This will show you the currently available options:

bash LundukeHoliday.sh

This will show you an animated Menorah:

bash LundukeHoliday.sh Menorah

And this will show the animated Christmas Tree:

bash LundukeHoliday.sh Tree

And… that’s it! Nice and simple, right?

Maybe I’ll add some more holidays in the future! New Years fireworks? Fourth of July waving flag? Lots of possibilities! Heck, maybe others will have some holiday-themed animations they want to submit in. Gotta spruce up those Terminals!

Oh, and before I forget…

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas to all you amazing nerds!

---