Cowser

A fun command-line tool that greets you with ASCII art cows. Inspired by cowsay, written in Python.

Features

• Greet users with a random ASCII art cow
• Pick a specific cow by name or index
• Custom messages and piping from stdin
• Colored output (and --no-color for scripts)
• Easy to extend with new cow designs

Installation

Requires Python 3.8+.

From PyPI

pip install cowser

From source

git clone https://github.com/rkriad585/Cowser
cd Cowser
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install .

Usage

The cowser command is installed on your PATH. The original python main.py ... and ./cowset ... invocations still work too.

Greet a user

cowser Alice

 _________
/ Hi Bob! \
\__________/
  ______
 /      \
|  (o) (o)
|   \/
 \______/

Custom message

cowser --message "Hello, world!"

Pipe text via stdin

echo "From stdin" | cowser

Pick a specific cow

cowser --cow top-hat Bob
cowser --cow 3 Bob

Names can be shortened to a unique prefix, e.g. --cow top.

Other options

Legacy commands

Backwards-compatible with the original script:

python main.py Alice
python main.py help
python main.py list
./cowset Alice

Adding more cows

Open cowser/cows.py and add a (name, art) tuple to the COWS list:

("my-cow", r"""   /\
  /  \
 | oo |
 ~~   ~~"""),

Use cowser --cow my-cow --list to verify it renders.

License

MIT © 2026 rkriad585