zfetch

Ultraquick terminal greeter

Build

You'll need zig installed. Here's how to do that

Then, build this project:

zig build -Drelease-fast=true

This will create a zfetch binary in the zig-out/bin directory. You can now run this binary as part of your shell's startup! The first run is significantly slower than subsequent runs. You should see sub-10ms timings.

I like to add this zig-out/bin directory to my $PATH for that clean zfetch invocation.

Unfortunately, zfetch is only implemented for macOS currently. If you'd like to add Linux/Windows implementations, PRs are more than welcome!

Customization

You don't need to know Zig to change small stuff, like the ASCII art. You'll want to head over to the src/art.zig file. Here's where you'll define a variable for your own ASCII art. You can use terminal escape sequences too! I've only really tested simple colored output. If you need help with this, I wrote a small blog post explaining the notation: Terminal color sequences

Once you have something you like, change the active_ascii_art variable in art.zig to the name of the variable you've stored your ASCII art in. You'll also want to adjust the estimated_art_width variable in main.zig. Because of unicode, it's really hard to do this programmatically, so I opted to just let people set it manually.

Remember to rebuild your project with:

zig build -Drelease-fast=true

There are two ASCII art strings in here currently: one of Latte (my cat) that I use on my personal computer, and one of Cloudflare's logo, that I use at work. You should clone this repo and add one that suits your style! If you're up for it, please share your art here.

Development

You'll need some Zig knowledge for this obviously. I've opted to write simple, straight-forward code, I feel like that is in the spirit of the Zig language. No vtables here! Please start a GitHub Discussion if you need help navigating the code, I'm more than happy to help.