Out of the barn and on to the interwebs: here it comes! xcowsay 1.3! This version is another minor upgrade to xcowsay with the following changes:

  • A number of small bug fixes in xcowsay itself and the configure script.
  • Setting --time=0 now means the cow is displayed until clicked.
  • If the text is so wide that the speech bubble would not fit on the screen, word wrapping is automatically applied. This can be disabled with --no-wrap.
  • As requested by some users, it is now possible to make the speech bubble appear on the left hand side using --left. This is useful if you are using your own left-facing image, for example.
  • New Russian and updated Portuguese translations.

You can download the source code here: xcowsay-1.3.tar.gz. There are no binary packages for this release as xcowsay is now in a large number of Linux distributions and BSD ports collections which will hopefully be updated soon.

You can now track xcowsay on GitHub if you like.

Several people have asked about anti-aliasing the edge of the cow and speech bubble. I’ve experimented a bit using Cario but unfortunately this does not seem to be possible as X only accepts a binary mask when cutting out shapes in windows. I think you would need a compositing window manager with a proper alpha channel for this to work so I doubt xcowsay will support it any time soon.