caca

[EXPERIMENTAL] The caca terminal is a mostly-for-fun output mode that uses libcaca to plot using ascii characters. In contrast to the dumb terminal it includes support for color, box fill, images, rotated text, filled polygons, and mouse interaction.

Syntax:

      set terminal caca {{driver | format} {default | <driver> | list}}
                        {color | monochrome}
                        {{no}inverted}
                        {enhanced | noenhanced}
                        {background <rgb color>}
                        {title "<plot window title>"}
                        {size <width>,<height>}
                        {charset ascii|blocks|unicode}

The driver option selects the libcaca display driver or export format. Use default is to let libcaca choose the platform default display driver. The default driver can be changed by setting the environment variable CACA_DRIVER before starting gnuplot. Use set term caca driver list to print a list of supported output modes.

The color and monochrome options select colored or mono output. Note that this also changes line symbols. Use the inverted option if you prefer a black background over the default white. This also changes the color of black default linetypes to white.

Enhanced text support can be activated using the enhanced option, see enhanced text.

The title of the output window can be changed with the title option, if supported by the libcaca driver.

The size option selects the size of the canvas in characters. The default is 80 by 25. If supported by the backend, the canvas size will be automatically adjusted to the current window/terminal size. The default size of the "x11" and "gl" window can be controlled via the CACA_GEOMETRY environment variable. The geometry of the window of the "win32" driver can be controlled and permanently changed via the app menu.

The charset option selects the character set used for lines, points, filling of polygons and boxes and dithering of images. Note that some backend/terminal/font combinations might not support some characters of the blocks or unicode character set. On Windows it is recommend to use a non-raster font such as "Lucida Console" or "Consolas".

The caca terminal supports mouse interaction. Please beware that some backends of libcaca (e.g. slang, ncurses) only update the mouse position on mouse clicks. Modifier keys (ctrl, alt, shift) are not supported by libcaca and are thus unavailable.

The default encoding of the caca terminal is utf8. It also supports the cp437 encoding.

The number of colors supported by libcaca backends differs. Most backends support 16 foreground and 16 background colors only, whereas e.g. the "x11" backend supports truecolor.

Depending on the terminal and libcaca backend, only 8 different background colors might be supported. Bright colors (with the most most significant bit of the background color set) are then interpreted as indicator for blinking text. Try using background rgb "gray" in that case.

See also the libcaca web site at http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca and libcaca environment variables http://caca.zoy.org/doxygen/libcaca/libcaca-env.html