5.1 KMS ponies

KMS ponies is an optional feature that required that you have util-say>=3 (util-say<2 for ponysay<2.1 and util-say<3 for ponysay<3) installed. It lets TTY users that have a custom TTY colour palette and KMS support get best TTY images that can be display at the current state of the art. KMS is supported on most computers, but due to lack of published specifications Nvidia drivers does not support KMS. util-say can be downloaded at https://github.com/maandree/util-say.

To use this feature your ~/.bashrc (or equivalent for your shell) must keep track of your colour palette; it is not possible for a program to ask to terminal. Either the shell should export a palette string to $PONYSAY_KMS_PALETTE or you should export a command to can get the palette string to $PONYSAY_KMS_PALETTE_CMD. The palette string should be the stream which sets the colour palette to the terminal when echo:ed; preferably, to increase speed and reduce cache usage, it should be consistent every time it is exported for every colours palette. So you may want to keep it sorted, always be in either upper case or lower case, and not contain an character that is not used to set the colour palette.

Assuming you have a function in your ~/.bashrc, to reset the colour palette to what you set it to last time in the terminal, named reset-palette, your ~/.bashrc should, for example, contain:

[ "$TERM" = "linux" ] &&
    function ponysay
    {   export PONYSAY_KMS_PALETTE="$(reset-palette)"
        exec ponysay "$@"
    }

KMS ponies uses /var/cache/ponysay/ or, if missing, ~/.cache/ponysay/ for cache space.

You may also want to read Fill KMS cache.