pokesay

Print pokemon in the CLI! An adaptation of the classic "cowsay"

demo

• pokesay
  • One-line installs
  • Usage
    • Full Usage
    • Examples
  • How it works
  • TODO
  • Similar projects

Other docs

• Building binaries
• Developing/Deploying

(These commands can also be used to update your existing pokesay)

• OSX / darwin

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash darwin amd64

• OSX / darwin (M1)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash darwin arm64

• Linux x64

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash linux amd64

• Android ARM64 (Termux)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash android arm64

• Windows x64 (.exe)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash windows amd64

Just pipe some text! e.g.

echo yolo | pokesay

To see it every time you open a terminal, add it to your .bashrc file!
(This requires that you have fortune installed)

echo 'fortune | pokesay' >> $HOME/.bashrc

Note: The pokesay tool is intended to only be used with piped text input from STDIN, entering text by typing (or other methods) might not work as expected!

Run pokesay with -h or --help to see the full usage

Usage: pokesay [-bCfhjLlsuvW] [-c value] [-n value] [-t value] [-w value] [parameters ...]
 -b, --info-border draw a border around the info box
 -c, --category=value
 choose a pokemon from a specific category
 -C, --no-category-info
 do not print pokemon category information in the info box
 -f, --fastest run with the fastest possible configuration (--nowrap &
 --notabspaces)
 -h, --help display this help message
 -j, --japanese-name
 print the japanese name in the info box
 -L, --list-categories
 list all available categories
 -l, --list-names list all available names
 -n, --name=value choose a pokemon from a specific name
 -s, --no-tab-spaces
 do not replace tab characters (fastest)
 -t, --tab-width=value
 replace any tab characters with N spaces [4]
 -u, --unicode-borders
 use unicode characters to draw the border around the speech
 box (and info box if --info-border is enabled)
 -v, --verbose print verbose output
 -W, --no-wrap disable text wrapping (fastest)
 -w, --width=value the max speech bubble width [80]

• List all available categories

  pokesay -L

• List all available names

  pokesay -l

• Print a message with a random pokemon

  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay

• Print a message with a specific pokemon

  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -n pikachu

• Print a message with a specific pokemon category

  # big pokemon (i.e. with a large dimensions in the terminal)
  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -c big
  # shiny pokemon
  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -c shiny

• Print a message with a specific pokemon category and name

  # for shiny charizards
  echo 'Hello, world!' | pokesay -c shiny -n charizard

This project extends on the original fortune | cowsay, a simple command combo that can be added to your .bashrc to give you a random message spoken by a cow every time you open a new shell.

 ☯ ~ fortune | cowsay
 ______________________________________
/ Hollywood is where if you don't have \
| happiness you send out for it. |
| |
\ -- Rex Reed /
 --------------------------------------
 \ ^__^
 \ (oo)\_______
 (__)\ )\/\
 ||----w |
 || ||

As a personal project, this has been lovingly over-engineered with a focus on the lowest latency possible, so that it doesn't slow down your terminal experience.

1. These pokemon sprites used here are sourced from the awesome repo msikma/pokesprite

   sprits

2. All of these sprites are converted into a form that can be rendered in a terminal (unicode characters and colour control sequences) by the img2xterm tool, found at rossy/img2xterm

3. Use some go tools (encoding/gob and go:embed) to generate a go source code file that encodes all of the converted unicode sprites as gzipped text and some search-optimised data structures.

4. Finally, this is built with the main CLI logic in pokesay.go into an single executable that can be easily popped into a directory in the user's $PATH

If all you are after is installing the program to use, then there are no dependencies required! Navigate to the Releases and download the latest binary.

• Short-term
  • optionally print ID assigned to each pokemon, support deterministic selection via the same ID
• Longer-term
• In Beta
  • support long and short cli args (e.g. --name/-n)
• Completed
  • Make the category struct faster to load - currently takes up to 80% of the execution time
  • Store metadata and names in a more storage-efficient manner
  • Import japanese names from data/pokemon.json
  • Fix bad whitespace stripping when building assets
  • List all names
  • Make data structure to hold categories, names and pokemon
  • Increase speed
  • Improve categories to be more specific than shiny/regular
  • Filter by both name and category

There are many other projects that bring pokemon to the terminal! Check them out via the links.

Inspired by the pokeshell project, I've included a comparison table