Installer boxes avec Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, scoop

Liens du projet

• Page d'accueil
• Dépôt

Commandes et alias

• boxes

Historique du projet

The project is maintained under the ascii-boxes organization and documents Thomas Jensen's official website, manual page, and configuration syntax as its primary user-facing surfaces. The modern GitHub history includes a v1.0 tag in 2014 and ongoing maintenance releases into the 2020s, while the README says the program itself dates back to 1999.

The program's historical shape is classic filter culture: it reads text, applies a named box design, and writes transformed text. Later documentation emphasizes user-defined box designs, shared configuration files, editor integration, and portability across Unix-like systems and Windows.

Historique d'adoption

The official README notes package-manager availability across apt, rpm, choco, brew, and other ecosystems. The Homebrew input also lists boxes in apk, brew, Debian, Fedora, MacPorts, Nix, Scoop, and Ubuntu, which matches its role as a small portable utility rather than a single-platform application.

Adoption is helped by its editor-filter workflow: the manual and website describe using boxes from editors that can pipe text through external filters, making it useful for source comments, email, plain-text notes, and README ornamentation.

Modes d'utilisation

Typical usage pipes text into the command, for example the official README's `echo foo | boxes`, then chooses designs with options such as listing available boxes. The configuration documentation explains that custom designs live in boxes config files and can be shared back through the repository.

Because it is a pure command-line filter, boxes composes naturally with shells, editors, and scripts. Its value is not heavy document rendering; it is quick decoration and comment-block formatting in plain text.

Pourquoi les passionnés de paquets s'y intéressent

boxes is package-nerd catnip because it is tiny, old, portable, and visually obvious: a package manager installs one command and the user immediately sees a text transformation. It represents the ornamental side of Unix filters, where package collections preserve small tools whose usefulness is partly practical and partly cultural.

The project also has an unusually packageable asset: the box-design database. That makes it more than a binary wrapper; distributions are shipping a small command plus a community-curated catalog of ASCII layouts.

Chronologie

• 1999: Project origin date stated in the official README.
• 2014: v1.0 tag appears in the official GitHub repository.
• 2021: v2.1.1 tag appears in the official GitHub repository.
• 2024: Official website documents v2.3.1 as a maintenance release.

Related projects

• boxes relates to classic Unix text filters, editor filter commands, figlet-style terminal ornamentation, and other ASCII-art utilities.
• Its closest project-specific related artifact is the official boxes-config file, where the bundled and contributed box designs are maintained.

Sources

• https://boxes.thomasjensen.com/
• https://boxes.thomasjensen.com/boxes-man-1.html
• https://boxes.thomasjensen.com/config-syntax.html
• https://github.com/ascii-boxes/boxes#readme
• source_facts.package-manager