I like little terminal messages the way people used to like fortune — something short that shows up when you open a shell and reminds you the machine isn’t entirely boring. I wanted a place for custom quotes, and then I wondered “what if other people could write them?”. So I built graffiti.moe: a tiny public wall you spray from the browser, and read from the terminal.

For a long time my login message was just a dad joke:

curl -H "Accept: text/plain" https://icanhazdadjoke.com/

That still works. This is the same idea, except the jokes (and ascii art, and whatever else fits) come from whoever shows up.

What it is

Graffiti Moe is a curl-able graffiti wall. Drop a short message on the site (color and bold optional), and anyone else can pull a random one into their terminal. Think fortune cookies with spray paint.

Browsers land on the compose page and see the recent sprays. Terminals get plain text by default, with optional server-side color when you ask for it.

If this works out, you’ll probably need a good sense of humor and a certain forgiveness of human nature, as there’s no telling what people will write on your terminal login.

House rules

There’s no automated language filtering. Contributions are anonymous. I take no responsibility for what others write. Hate speech and pornographic content will be removed by the admin as quickly as possible.

Don’t be that person. Spray something fun instead. I’m putting a lot of faith in humanity with this one, (please) don’t let me down.

From your terminal

Homebrew:

brew tap ttscoff/thelab
brew install graffiti

Then:

graffiti
graffiti --color=always
graffiti spraypaint --color cyan --bold 'hello wall'

No Homebrew? curl works fine:

curl https://graffiti.moe
curl 'https://graffiti.moe?color=always'

Stick graffiti (or the curl) in your shell startup and you’ve got a new login fortune every time.

Come spray something

Please do. The wall is more interesting when it isn’t just me talking to myself. Hit graffiti.moe, leave a line, and if you like it, wire a random spray into your login routine.

Sprays can be up to 1000 characters, and newlines/indents are preserved, so you can do things like multi-line quotes or even ascii art.

The wall on the main page will update live every 10s with new sprays. This will be more interesting if adoption picks up.

How long it lives

If this picks up any traction, a future roadmap item is multiple colors in one message (real spraypaint, not just one palette pick for the whole blob). I’ll wait and see how much attention it gets and how much administration it takes before I decide how long it sticks around.

For now it’s up. Go write on it!