Let your terminal greet you like a pro

#linux #bash #ubuntu #beginners

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

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

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
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

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

Thanks for reading!!

Top comments (9)

Casper • Jun 25 '20

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.

Dom Hastings • Jun 26 '20

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

kartik puri • Jun 25 '20

Perfect

Heidi Harding • Jun 25 '20

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

Dom Hastings • Jun 26 '20

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...