Yujian Yao

So I often get asked about my terminal because it’s a little bit flamboyant:

So today I am going to write about how this can be achieved.

Here’s the tools that you need: cowsay, fortune, gshuf and lolcat.

cowsay, fortune and gshuf are binaries so depending on your OS, you can use your package manager to install them. lolcat is a ruby gem so you will need to install ruby first, then do you usual gem install lolcat.

After that, add the following line to your .bashrc (or .bash_profile) if you are using a Mac.

fortune | cowsay -f $(cowsay -l | tail -n +2 | tr ' ' '\n' | gshuf -n 1) | lolcat

This line basically pipes a random fortune to a random ‘cow’, then to lolcat, which adds colors. The slowest part is lolcat because it’s ruby, but most of the time the delay is acceptable given the nice final effects.

Hope this is useful =)