skip right to the purdy pictures: <a href="https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/public/assets/animals.saved" rel="nofollow">https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/public/assets/an...</a> [400kb text file download]<p>which apparently are all <i>borrowed</i> from here: <a href="http://www.heartnsoul.com/ascii_art/ascii_animals_indx.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.heartnsoul.com/ascii_art/ascii_animals_indx.htm</a>
There are practical uses for ASCII animals. When I built a command-line tool to let the developers sign out for a 15 minute break at my last job (because doing it via the AS/400 interface was a big hassle), I used a big, yellow elephant [1]. This made it easy to remember to hit the enter key to go back on the clock when they got back to their computer.<p>[1]: I think it was this one: <a href="http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt" rel="nofollow">http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt</a>
My favorite (useful!) ASCII terminal animal is the Nyan Cat RSpec formatter. I love that little guy.<p><a href="http://mattsears.com/articles/2011/11/16/nyan-cat-rspec-formatter" rel="nofollow">http://mattsears.com/articles/2011/11/16/nyan-cat-rspec-form...</a><p>He makes the tests slower, but I still have him check my entire suite of specs at least once a day.
Neat, but it seems to make an http request for every frame. Unclear if requests caches that, but I did get a socket error on KeyboardInterrupt so I don't think so.