@kszongic/zalgo-cli

Generate creepy zalgo text from the command line. Zero dependencies.

$ zalgo "hello world"
h e l l o   w o r l d   (but cursed)

Why?

• Creepy text for Halloween, horror themes, or just for fun
• Social media posts that stand out
• Game dev glitch text for menus, loading screens, or lore
• Unicode stress-testing for your app
• Zero dependencies, installs in under a second

Install

npm install -g @kszongic/zalgo-cli

Or run without installing:

npx @kszongic/zalgo-cli "he comes"

Usage

zalgo hello world
echo "the end is near" | zalgo
zalgo -i 3 "subtle whisper"
zalgo --intensity 9 "MAXIMUM CORRUPTION"

Options

Flag	Description
-i, --intensity <n>	Intensity level 1-10 (default: 5)
-h, --help	Show help
-v, --version	Show version

Intensity Guide

Level	Vibe
1-2	Subtle unease
3-4	Something is wrong
5	Classic zalgo (default)
6-7	Hard to read
8-10	Pure chaos

Recipes

Halloween social media post

zalgo -i 7 "trick or treat" | pbcopy   # macOS
zalgo -i 7 "trick or treat" | clip     # Windows

Spooky commit message

git commit -m "$(zalgo -i 3 'fix: resolved the haunted bug')"

Generate glitch text for a game

for word in "ERROR" "SYSTEM FAILURE" "HE SEES YOU" "WAKE UP"; do
  zalgo -i 8 "$word"
done > glitch-strings.txt

Gradual corruption effect

for i in 1 3 5 7 9; do
  zalgo -i $i "the signal is degrading"
done

Unicode stress test

zalgo -i 10 "$(cat input.txt)" | your-renderer

Chain with other tools

fortune | zalgo -i 4
echo "moo" | zalgo -i 6 | cowsay

How It Works

Zalgo text uses Unicode combining characters, diacritical marks that stack above, below, and through base characters. The CLI randomly attaches combining marks (U+0300 to U+036F and beyond) to each character. Higher intensity means more marks per character means more chaos.

This is valid Unicode. Any system that renders Unicode will display the stacked marks. Some renderers handle it gracefully; others don't. That's the fun.

Use Cases

• Social media and messaging eye-catching posts
• Horror/ARG content creepy text for games, videos, stories
• Memes and fun
• QA testing stress-test text rendering, input validation, databases
• Creative coding generative art, interactive fiction

Comparison

Feature	zalgo-cli	zalgo.js (library)	Online generators
CLI / pipe-friendly	Yes	No	No
Intensity control	1-10	Yes	Sometimes
stdin support	Yes	No	No
Zero dependencies	Yes	No	N/A
Offline	Yes	Yes	No
Scriptable	Yes	Yes	No

Related Tools

Other @kszongic CLI tools:

• matrix-rain-cli Matrix digital rain in the terminal
• mirror-text-cli Reverse/mirror text with Unicode
• lorem-gen-cli Generate placeholder text
• rotn-cli ROT-N cipher encoding
• string-hash-cli Hash strings from the terminal

Zero Dependencies

This package has no dependencies. Just Node.js.

License

MIT