In light of the snow scripts from a few weeks ago, a pipes script might be fun too.
There are a lot of pipes scripts out there in the wild. Here’s one that works reasonably well.
Only one of those pictures is from my system. You can guess which one. (Oh — and keep in mind that your font needs to support the characters that draw the pipe symbols. 🙄 )
Oddly enough, I’ve had a few problems trying to run this script in some terminals; for example, a live Linux mint environment gives errors, as do a couple of others.
When it works though, it’s a clever trick. Thanks to the Unix screenshot sub-reddit for including a link to it. 🙂
Ah … I almost forgot: For the naysayers who ask what good this could possibly be … remember screen’s idle setting. And thank me after you get it set up.
Inconsolation 
Great fun script. I made a few changes and a video for showing the changes: multiple pipes, non-centered starting point, and no color options.
When I first saw the screenshot of yours, I thought “well, maybe block is new pipe,” (didn’t read post yet) then the other animated screenshot showed the correct characters. I think I can modify with new `-U` option for terminal without Unicode support and using “-|+” or “/\” to emulate the pipe look, if someone needs it.
I wonder if anyone knows who is the original author of the script, modifying the code without knowing makes me a little uncomfortable, the one on pastebin dated back in April, 2012. I thought that was the original, but I found a post on Arch Linux forums, almost three-year-old. Still, don’t know who wrote it.
Thanks for sharing this script. (wish tmux has same idle setting)
Oops! It seems I messed up the markup, shouldn’t use less/greater-than signs to wrap the link here , the links are as follows:
Gist: https://gist.github.com/4689307
Video: http://youtu.be/5XnGSFg_gTk
Forum post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=728932#p728932
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For anyone curious about the second screenshot: here’s the source, with configs – the theme in the screenshot is “October”. The window manager is wmfs2. The background is a picture of the Viridian Forest from Pokemon.
I know I’m 2 months late and this blog is not about GUIs, but… better Nate than lever.
Beautiful desktop. One question: how do you get the rounder corners using pipes.sh? I’ve tried several different pipes.sh scripts, using many fonts. Profont, Lemon, Gohu, etc…all of them use square heavy border characters for the pipe characters, and it’s driving me nuts. I’ve even downloaded the same fonts as others use in their screenshots, only to end up at the start again with square corners.
Thank you kindly!
Disregard! The culprit turned out to be the terminal I was using [st.suckless.org].
No problem! Sorry I wasn’t of much help, but I’m glad you got it sorted out. Cheers! 🙂