Enhancing Your Terminal Experience with Fun and Functional Tools
Mithun Satyanarayana
Dynamic Senior SRE & DevOps Engineer | Expert in SDLC & Agile | Mastery in AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins | Ex-HARMAN AWS DevOps Champion | H1B Visa Holder
As DevOps/SRE, we spend a significant amount of time in the terminal. Why not make the experience more enjoyable and productive? Here are some tools and tweaks that can bring a bit of fun and functionality to your terminal sessions.?
Prerequisites
Before we start, make sure you have HomeBrew installed. You can check by running the following command:
brew -v
If HomeBrew is not installed, you can get it from Brew.sh
Step-by-Step Installation Guide
1. Install cowsay
??
??brew install cowsay
??
2. Install fortune
??
??brew install fortune
??
3. Install figlet
??
??brew install figlet
??
4. Install Ruby
??Make sure you have Ruby installed:
??
??ruby -v
??
??If not, follow the instructions on the Ruby website to install it.
5. Install lolcat
??
??gem install lolcat
??
??Alternatively, you can install lolcat via HomeBrew:
??
??brew install lolcat
??
领英推荐
Optional: Customizing Your Shell Configuration
To make these tools readily available, you can add them to your .bash_profile or .bashrc/.zshrc file. Here’s how you can do it:
1. Open your .bash_profile or .bashrc/.zshrc file in a text editor:
??
??nano ~/.bash_profile
??
??or
??
??nano ~/.zshrc
??
2. Add the following lines to include fortune and cowsay at the start of each terminal session:
??
??if command -v fortune &> /dev/null && command -v cowsay &> /dev/null; then
???fortune | cowsay | lolcat
??fi
??
3. Save and close the file. To apply the changes, run:
??
??source ~/.bash_profile
??
??or
??
??source ~/.zshrc
??
See Also
For more fun and functional terminal customizations, check out the following resources:
- Awesome comments contributed below - thanks to everyone!
- Cowsay errors and entire collection of cows
-How to customize your console login message
Enhancing your terminal with these tools can make your daily tasks more enjoyable and visually appealing. Give it a try and see the difference it makes!