How do I use it?

[smith]

brew installed libcaca. Still can't figure out how to make it work. Could you explain on the README or am I missing something obvious?

[jrunning]

Yeah I know I should write out some instructions. Basic steps:

1. Run img2txt -v to make sure it's working.
2. Make sure the script is executable (e.g. chmod a+x piano-ascii-art.sh).
3. Edit ~/.config/pianobar/config and put the full path to piano-ascii-art.sh for the event_cmd= option, e.g.:

event_command = /home/your_username/.config/pianobar/piano-ascii-art.sh

Let me know if it still doesn't work.

[smith]

Closer. How do I use multiple event_commands? (didn't RTFM). I want to use growl and this. img2txt is working by itself I think but I'm getting:

img2txt: unable to load *

This is important. I need this for my business.

[jrunning]

pianobar doesn't have built-in support for multiple eventcmd scripts. I use a bash script that just sends the output to every executable file in a directory, which works pretty well actually:

#!/bin/bash

DIR=$(cd `dirname $0` && pwd) # Where this script lives

output=`cat /dev/stdin`

for SCRIPT in $(find $DIR/eventcmd/ -not \( -type d -name ".?*" -prune \) -type f); do
  if [ -f $SCRIPT -a -x $SCRIPT ]; then
    echo -e "$output" | $SCRIPT $@
  fi
done

As for the error, I'm not sure how to fix it. It has to do with the (very dumb) way it downloads images into a hardcoded directory before and then passes * as the filename to img2txt. I'm intending to replace that method with something less dumb in the near future--in the immediate term, however, you may have to just eyeball the source and see if you can figure out a solution.

[smith]

Looks like the homebrew default install for libcaca compiles with --disable-imlib2, which means it only works with BMP files. Trying to get that figured out. Where did your caca come from?

[jrunning]

Ohhhh yeah, I forgot about that. I had the same problem. I think I installed imlib2 with homebrew (brew install imlib2), then built my caca from source, which you can download here.

EDIT: You can modify the compile flags with brew edit libcaca and just delete that --disable-imlib2 flag. After that you should be able to do brew install imlib2 libcaca for great justice.

I have no idea why the brew recipe has that --disable-imlib2 flag.

[avit]

For anyone else who lands here having problems with brew's libcaca installation on Mac OS X, you now need this:

brew install libcaca --with-imlib2

[ment4t]

Had issue with ranger not rendering ASCII previews (using img2txt). Reinstalled libcaca following avit's comment above resolved the problem.