zsh ansi motd (message of the day)

This zsh plugin adds an old skool ansi art based motd when the login shell is executed

Why

I grew up in the day's of BBS's and ansi art so I wanted something to replicate the experience of jumping onto a new BBS everytime I started my login shell

Installation

Dependencies

• zsh
• shuf which is part of gnu coreutils

For Mac/Linux using Homebrew you can install coreutils using

brew install coreutils

Optional

• 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 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 ANSI_MOTD_ART_DIR

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

Using the plugins helper function

Use ansi_art_download to download all zip files of ansi art from a url and unpack them into the ansi motd config directory (this can take a while depending on the amount of ansi art contained in that year)

eg. to download all ansi art from 1996 from the url http://artscene.textfiles.com/artpacks/1996/ run the following in your shell

ansi_art_download http://artscene.textfiles.com/artpacks/1996/

Manually

Copy any .ans, .img or .asc files containg ansi art into your ANSI_MOTD_ART_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

• ANSI_MOTD_ART_DIR - the full path to the config directory where the plugin will search for ansi art
• ANSI_MOTD_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 ANSI_MOTD_RATE_LIMIT_OUTPUT ENV variable

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

export ANSI_MOTD_RATE_LIMIT_OUTPUT="8k"

See also Pull Request #10 to see it in action

Small screens

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

export ANSI_MOTD_DISABLE_LINE_WRAPPING=1

See also Pull Request #6

Note

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

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license

Contributors

Made with contrib.rocks.

Special Thanks 🙇

• To romkatv for posting a fix for the word wrapping issue on narrow terminals
• To mainsm for posting 👆 as an issue in the repo