boxes

Command line ASCII boxes unlimited!

Boxes is a command line filter program that draws ASCII art boxes around your input text (examples).

For more information, please visit the website.

Status

Boxes is stable.

It has been around since 1999, and has since been included in several Linux distributions and, lately, even Windows 10, via its Ubuntu subsystem. Its source code is quite portable, and so, boxes has been made to run on a wide range of platforms, from Windows PCs to Netgear routers.

Boxes has matured, and is thusly no longer being actively developed. But contributors can be sure that their pull requests are promptly reviewed and merged into the main code base.

License

Boxes is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2).

Development

The website has information on building from source, testing, and contributing to the source code.
Boxes has received support from many contributors over the years, and continues to benefit greatly from contributions. Many thanks for that!

Running it

Try if boxes works by typing echo foo | boxes on the command line. It should give you something like that:

/*******/
/* foo */
/*******/

Type boxes -l to get a long list of box designs to use. Detailed usage information is in the manual page and on the website. Consider tying boxes to your editor, so that it can be invoked by a simple keypress.

Custom box designs

You can define your own box designs!

We appreciate the creative new box designs that you craft for boxes. Please feel free to submit them in the form of pull requests on boxes-config, and they may make it into the next release!

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    /\                        \
    \_|    Thank you for      |
      |    using Boxes!       |
      |  _____________________|_
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