A small, fast C implementation of lolcat for rainbow-colored terminal output.

• Rainbow-colored output using ANSI truecolor codes
• Random starting color for each run
• Optional flags:
  • -v / --version : Show version and author
  • -f <value> : Set color frequency (default: 0.01)
  • -p <value> : Set color spread (default: 1.0)
  • -h / --help : Show this help message
• No delays; instant output
• Easy to install in user space, no sudo required

Clone the repository and run the installer:

git clone https://github.com/ramdeoshubham/clolcat.git cd clolcat bash install.sh

This will compile clolcat and move it to ~/bin/.
If ~/bin is not in your PATH, the installer will add it to your shell configuration.

Pipe text to clolcat:

echo "Hello Kitty!" | clolcat cat myfile.txt | clolcat

Optional flags:

clolcat -v # Show version clolcat -h # Show help clolcat -f 0.2 # Set frequency clolcat -p 4.0 # Set spread clolcat -f 0.2 -p 4.0 < file.txt

Since it is installed entirely in user space you just need to:

rm ~/bin/clolcat

That's it.

MIT License © 2025 Shubham Ramdeo

This project is inspired by the original lolcat utility.