pokesay

Print pokemon in the CLI! An adaptation of the classic "cowsay"

• pokesay
  • One-line installs
  • Usage
    • Full Usage
    • Examples
  • How it works
  • Similar projects
  • TODO

Other docs

• Building binaries
• Developing/Deploying

---

One-line installs

(These commands can also be used to update your existing pokesay)

• OSX / darwin

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash darwin amd64

• OSX / darwin (M1)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash darwin arm64

• Linux x64

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash linux amd64

• Android ARM64 (Termux)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash android arm64

• Windows x64 (.exe)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash windows amd64

---

Usage

Just pipe some text! e.g.

echo yolo | pokesay

To see it every time you open a terminal, add it to your .bashrc file!
(This requires that you have fortune installed)

echo 'fortune | pokesay' >> $HOME/.bashrc

Note: The pokesay tool is intended to only be used with piped text input from STDIN, entering text by typing (or other methods) might not work as expected!

Full Usage

Run pokesay with -h or --help to see the full usage

Usage: pokesay [-bCfhjLlsuvW] [-c value] [-n value] [-t value] [-w value] [parameters ...]
 -b, --info-border  draw a border around the info box
 -c, --category=value
                    choose a pokemon from a specific category
 -C, --no-category-info
                    do not print pokemon category information in the info box
 -f, --fastest      run with the fastest possible configuration (--nowrap &
                    --notabspaces)
 -h, --help         display this help message
 -j, --japanese-name
                    print the japanese name in the info box
 -L, --list-categories
                    list all available categories
 -l, --list-names   list all available names
 -n, --name=value   choose a pokemon from a specific name
 -s, --no-tab-spaces
                    do not replace tab characters (fastest)
 -t, --tab-width=value
                    replace any tab characters with N spaces [4]
 -u, --unicode-borders
                    use unicode characters to draw the border around the speech
                    box (and info box if --info-border is enabled)
 -v, --verbose      print verbose output
 -W, --no-wrap      disable text wrapping (fastest)
 -w, --width=value  the max speech bubble width [80]

Examples

• List all available categories

  pokesay -L

• List all available names

  pokesay -l

• Print a message with a random pokemon

  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay

• Print a message with a specific pokemon

  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -n pikachu

• Print a message with a specific pokemon category

  # big pokemon (i.e. with a large dimensions in the terminal)
  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -c big
  # shiny pokemon
  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -c shiny

• Print a message with a specific pokemon category and name

  # for shiny charizards
  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -c shiny -n charizard

---

How it works

This project extends on the original fortune | cowsay, a simple command combo that can be added to your .bashrc to give you a random message spoken by a cow every time you open a new shell.

 ☯ ~ fortune | cowsay
 ______________________________________
/ Hollywood is where if you don't have \
| happiness you send out for it.       |
|                                      |
\ -- Rex Reed                          /
 --------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

As a personal project, this has been lovingly over-engineered with a focus on the lowest latency possible, so that it doesn't slow down your terminal experience.

1. These pokemon sprites used here are sourced from the awesome repo msikma/pokesprite

   

2. All of these sprites are converted into a form that can be rendered in a terminal (unicode characters and colour control sequences) by the img2xterm tool, found at rossy/img2xterm

3. Use some go tools (encoding/gob and go:embed) to generate a go source code file that encodes all of the converted unicode sprites as gzipped text and some search-optimised data structures.

4. Finally, this is built with the main CLI logic in pokesay.go into an single executable that can be easily popped into a directory in the user's $PATH

If all you are after is installing the program to use, then there are no dependencies required! Navigate to the Releases and download the latest binary.

Similar projects

There are many other projects that bring pokemon to the terminal! Check them out via the links.

Inspired by the pokeshell project, I've included a comparison table

project	dependencies	speed	japanese names	size categories	selection by name	selection by category	animated sprites
pokeshell	imagemagick, chafa	?	?	?	?	?	?
pokemon-icat	python	?	?	?	?	?	?
pokemon-colorscripts	python3	?	?	?	?	?	?
pokemonsay-newgenerations	cowsay (perl)	?	?	?	?	?	?
pokeTerm	python3	?	?	?	?	?	?
krabby	rust, cargo	?	❌	❌	✓	❌	❌
pokemonsay	npm	?	?	?	?	?	?

---

TODO

• In progress
  • optionally print ID assigned to each pokemon, support deterministic selection via the same ID
• Short-term
• Longer-term
  • make the process async.
    • (Currently the searching/pokemon fetching is done before any printing begins. There's an opportunity to start printing the speech bubble while also fetching the pokemon to print below it)
• In Beta
  • support long and short cli args (e.g. --name/-n)
• Completed
  • Make the category struct faster to load - currently takes up to 80% of the execution time
  • Store metadata and names in a more storage-efficient manner
  • Import japanese names from data/pokemon.json
  • Fix bad whitespace stripping when building assets
  • List all names
  • Make data structure to hold categories, names and pokemon
  • Increase speed
  • Improve categories to be more specific than shiny/regular
  • Filter by both name and category