ansimotd: Retro ANSI Art for Your Terminal

I built a little shell script called ansimotd that displays random ANSI art whenever you open a terminal.

ansimotd example

How it works

The script looks for ANSI art files in ~/.config/ansimotd/ and randomly selects one to display. It parses SAUCE metadata (a 128-byte block at the end of ANSI files) to determine the dimensions of each piece of art.

Getting started

To use it, just add it to your shell profile:

# Add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc
source /path/to/ansimotd.sh

Then populate ~/.config/ansimotd/ with ANSI art files. The README includes instructions for downloading art collections.

Technical details

The script handles several interesting challenges:

SAUCE parsing: Extracts width and height from binary metadata using tail, od, and byte offset calculations
Terminal detection: Falls back gracefully when tput isn’t available
Random selection: Uses shuf for efficient random sampling without loading all files into memory
Character encoding: Converts from CP437 (the DOS character set) to display art correctly

It’s a fun little project that adds some personality to your terminal. Check it out at github.com/retlehs/ansimotd.