              __           __
 .-----.-----|  |--.______|  |--.---.-.-----.-----.-----.----.
 |-- __|__ --|     |______|  _  |  _  |     |     |  -__|   _|
 |_____|_____|__|__|      |_____|___._|__|__|__|__|_____|__|

zsh-banner

A zsh plugin to display ANSI/ASCII art on shell startup.

This is a simplified/slightly adapted and maintained fork of yuhonas/zsh-ansimotd.

Installation

Dependencies

Optional

shuf which is part of gnu coreutils
fd a modern find replacement, it will use this preferentially if it's installed otherwise fallback to find.
pv a pipe viewer which can limit the art rendering speed to emulate the feel of an old skool BBS.

Install using your favourite plugin manager or not

# for zinit
zinit light drkhsh/zsh-banner

# for znap
znap source yuhonas/zsh-ansimotd

# for antigen
antigen bundle yuhonas/zsh-ansimotd

# for zplug
zplug "yuhonas/zsh-ansimotd"

# manually
# Clone the repository and source it in your shell's rc file

Getting some awesome ansi art to display

After installation you'll need to download some ansi art for it to randomly display, I suggest a few places:

16colo.rs

Head over to 16colo.rs and if you find a year(s) you like you can download everything from that year using their rsync mirror.

eg. to download everything from 1996 to the ZSH_BANNER_DIR:

rsync -azvhP --include '*/' --include '*.ANS' --exclude '*' rsync://16colo.rs/pack/1996 "$ZSH_BANNER_DIR"

artscene.textfiles.com

Find a pack you like at artscene and unpack it into the ansi motd config directory.

You can do this by copying any .ans, or .asc files containg ansi art into your ZSH_BANNER_DIR directory which is derived from ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/ansimotd (the plugin performs a recursive search for art so any directory nesting is fine).

Configuration / Settings

The plugin exports the following useful variables to the session

ZSH_BANNER_DIR - the full path to the config directory where the plugin will search for ansi art
ZSH_BANNER_FILENAME - the full file path to the last shown peice of ansi art, if you want to do something with it, laud over it, delete it etc

There's also a handful of ENV variables you can use to configure the plugin (these will need to be set prior to plugin instantiation).

The real BBS experience

To buffer the ansi art output at a fixed speed you can set the ZSH_BANNER_RATE_LIMIT_OUTPUT ENV variable.

eg. to limit the ansi art rendering rate to a data rate of 8k:

export ZSH_BANNER_RATE_LIMIT_OUTPUT="8k"

Small screens

If you happen to be running on a small fixed screen perhaps on something like termux you can set the following environemnt variable to truncate the art to screen width:

export ZSH_BANNER_DISABLE_LINE_WRAPPING=1

Note

Art to be displayed is assumed to use the Code Page 437 character set.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.