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kartik puri
kartik puri

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Let your terminal greet you like a pro

If you are a developer, the terminal is your one-stop for most of your day to day development activities. As a developer we made sure that our coding setup looks great, we have an amazing dark theme or minimal setup, etc, etc..

Recently I thought of making my terminal look geekier so I just added an echo in my bashrc file but that was not enough it has to look cool right? I just added the ASCCI representation of my profile picture.

So let's start by getting an image, I used one my own image that I created using gimp you can find the tutorial here

1. Create an ASCII art of your image

Alt Text

You can visit asciiart URL and convert your image into an ASCII version.

If you don't have an image you can find some beautiful ASCII art at ascii art archive

There are various tools to generate ASCII text I have used this one here

2. Let's get the things ready

  • First, open your terminal and create a new file nano mygreeting
  • Next, copy and paste you ASCII art and text to this file nano terminal

You can hit a few tabs to adjust in the center and save the file to use in future

3. Let's revive our terminal and add this as a greeting message

Now, we need to display the content of our file created in step 2 to get displayed in the terminal as soon as it is fired up

  • Open your bashrc file
    nano ~/.bashrc
    Alt Text

  • Add a small line at the bottom cat mygreeting and it's done

Fire up your terminal to have a look at your beautiful message waiting for you

Amazing right?

Cakewalk right !! Go ahead and try this let me know your thoughts in the comment section.

Thanks for reading!!

Top comments (9)

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cappe987 profile image
Casper

Cool idea. Instead of the ascii art I have a file with notes in my home directory that I cat everytime I open the terminal. I like to keep reminders or a short to-do list there. If I need to edit the notes I just use Vim real quick.

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dom111 profile image
Dom Hastings

I actually made a little bash script to track TODOs and show them in the corner of your terminal, I wonder if that's helpful too?

github.com/dom111/bash-todo

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kartikpuri95 profile image
kartik puri

Perfect

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katzekat profile image
Heidi Harding

if you like a little more colour, pipe it through lolcat :-)

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dom111 profile image
Dom Hastings

Or take a colour image and use this little tool I made a while back: dom111.github.io/image-to-ansi/

I wanted to have the "uh uh uh you didn't say the magic word!" Image from Jurassic Park be returned by our git server if you omit a Jira issue from the commit...

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kartikpuri95 profile image
kartik puri

That's a really good idea

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yogionbioinformatics profile image
Yogindra Raghav

love it!

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binmansoor11 profile image
Talha Mansoor

Great! I was looking for it. You saved my time and efforts with your awesome post.

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kartikpuri95 profile image
kartik puri

Thanks a lot