How To Watch Star Wars in Terminal (Windows, Linux, Mac OS)

Star Wars is one of the most popular Sci-Fi movie movie franchise in the history of cinema. 
If you are one of its hard core fans, perhaps you won't mind watching it again. 

But it won't be HD or BlueRay edition. In terms of graphics, it's nowhere close to what you would expect but still fun nonetheless. Instead, it will be in ASCII format.

You can watch it on Windows, Mac Os and Linux or any OS that supports Telnet.
I'll also show you a few tricks that will make it ore colourful.

Telnet is a network protocol used to connect to another host or someone else's computer.

On Windows
Telnet is disable by default, so you need to enable it in the control panel.

If you don't have telnet, you can install it using the following command in your command line then press enter.

 pkgmgr /iu:"TelnetClient"  

If asked for administrator permissions, enter your password and confirm access.

Restart the command prompt and then type in the following command.

 Telnet Towel.blinkenlights.nl  

On Linux and OS X
On Linux, install Telnet by running

 sudo apt install telnet  

Open terminal and run

 telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl  

After the  familiar credits, Star Wars Episode IV will start playing in ASCII characters. Here is what you'll expect to see. 

To stop the animation press Ctrl + ] and then type quit to come out of the telnet command.

To make your output more colourful, use lolcat. It is a utility that will give your output rainbow colours.

To install lolcat in Linux
Lolcat belongs to the ruby gem package and it is necessary that you have the latest version installed in your system.
DNF based systems

 # dnf install ruby  

Yum based systems

 # yum install ruby  

APT based systems
Install ruby in the system

 sudo apt-get install ruby  

Check ruby version

 ruby -v

Get the latest version of lolcat from git repository using this command

 wget https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat/archive/master.zip  

Unzip the downloaded master.zip file

 unzip master.zip  

Change into the following directory

 cd lolcat-master/bin/  

Install lolcat within it

 gem install lolcat  

After installation is complete, check the version using the following command

 lolcat -v  

Use the following command to know the available options

 lolcat -h  

Now the lolcat command can be piped using various commands such as ll, cal and cat as shown below

 ll | lolcat  

Display calendar

  cal | lolcat  

Next, we're going to use the lolcat command alongside cowsay utility
Install it using the commands below

Ubuntu/Debian

  sudo apt-get install cowsay  

CentOS/RedHat

  yum install cowsay  

Fedora

  dnf install cowsay  

How to use cowsay with lolcat

 cowsay I love Linux | lolcat  

You can animate your text in rainbow colors as follows

 cowsay I love Linux | lolcat -a -d 30  

a=animation, d=duration.

You can also change the frequency. The default is usually 20. Use the following command

 cowsay I love Linux | lolcat -a -F 10  

Use the -p spreading option to spread the colours

 cowsay I love Linux | lolcat -a -p 10  

To change the speed of the output use -s

 cowsay I love Linux | lolcat -a -s 10  

Print the list of all the animals in cowsay using

 cowsay -l  

Here's an output of cowsay with cock and piped to lolcatcowfile

 cowsay -f cock I love Linux | lolcat  

You can use lolcat with any other command to get coloured output in your terminal.
To watch animated star wars, use the following command

 telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl | lolcat  

Please leave a comment below if it worked for you or if you experienced any problems.