Neofetch: Command-line system information tool written in bash

I think most Linux operating systems come with Python already installed (at least all the ones I use do). It could be uploaded to PyPI, which would mean installing PIP, but using pre-installed libraries would mean you could simply use git (which is usually pre-installed too), and then run `python3 setup.py install`.

walteweiss• 5 years ago

But what’s the point in doing that?

arminiusreturns• 5 years ago

Not sure about the gp, but lots of people on hn love to hate on bash, and give reasons either it's bad or lang is better.

mixmastamyk4• 5 years ago

Readability, maintainability, etc. if that matters to you.

krick3• 5 years ago

This is a pretty small project, and, furthermore, it is by its nature supposed to support a lot of different systems, so I personally don't know if it makes sense to rewrite it (and in Python out of all things: maybe then better rewrite it in a compiled language, so that you can distribute it as a binary?). So I'm hesistant to say one should do it: it might do more harm than good.

But if this wouldn't bother me, I would really want to rewrite it. Just look at the source. It is 11K LoC. It is very modular by nature, since there is a lot of stuff that is "the same, but slightly different" for each OS. It is really simple by nature, just a few dozens of directives, each of them should answer 1 pretty straight-forward question. So it should be fairly easy to read (and it actually makes a practical sense even for a user, since this is so much of a collection of knowledge about different OS, not so much a "real program"). But it's not (I mean, it's not easy to read, assuming you are comfortable with bash). And it's not badly-written bash-script, quite otherwise. It's just… bash. How exactly you'd improve that would depend on the language of choice, but every "proper" PL should make it possible to write this very thing in such a way, that reading it "entirely" in a few minutes would be trivial, and wouldn't require scrolling through 11K LoC. Just separating all ASCII-art from code and making a separate class (if we use Python) for each OS implementation with a common interface, extending 1 or more base-classes (for OS families) would improve it greatly, since it would take me literally seconds to see all directives it currently supports, and to find their implementations for the particular system I'm interested in. After scrolling through some maybe 200 LoC you'd feel that you know everything that it does, and the rest 10K LoC (or whatever it would be) are just "details".

So while actually suggesting to rewrite it in Python might show some lack of analysis, I wouldn't bash anyone for wishing it would have been written in Python.

simonw2• 5 years ago

The implementation of this - a single, huge bash script - is actually a pretty neat thing to browse through if you want to improve your knowledge of bash.

I particularly enjoyed this function that returns the ASCII-art logo for the current platform: https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/blob/017aa041d86340f2...

woodruffw• 5 years ago

I particularly enjoyed this function that returns the ASCII-art logo for the current platform

I wonder how much of it is copied from screenfetch[1], which (I believe) is the "grandfather" for a lot of these kinds of information viewers.

I wrote my own version of screenfetch[2] a very long time ago, and I'm pretty sure I just ripped their ASCII-art directly :-)

[1] https://github.com/KittyKatt/screenFetch/blob/c3a47890441166...

[2] https://github.com/woodruffw/screenfetch-c

forgotpwd162• 5 years ago

Relevant, Dylan had written a piece[0] on why he created Neofetch rather attempting to improve Screenfetch. It seems he later blanked the page, I guess due to being a bit heated.

[0] https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/wiki/Neofetch-vs.-Scr...

gexla• 5 years ago

GitHub Copilot strikes again.

linspace• 5 years ago

And it's actually developed as a single file. I do wonder if they have considered a solution like the sqlite amalgamation https://www.sqlite.org/amalgamation.html

michaelsbradley• 5 years ago

There’s also ncneofetch:

https://notcurses.com/ncneofetch.1.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY&t=1m22s

(timecode link)

r3trohack3r• 5 years ago

Dylan is also the author of KISS Linux and the pure {sh,bash} bibles. All interesting projects.

https://k1sslinux.org/ https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible

forgotpwd162• 5 years ago

Also author of a pure-bash file manager (https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff), TUI terminal pixer art editor (https://github.com/dylanaraps/pxltrm), IRC client (https://github.com/dylanaraps/birch), TUI client for Transmission torrent daemon (https://github.com/dylanaraps/torque), and even an attempt to coreutils implementation (https://github.com/dylanaraps/bareutils). A bash wizard someone may say.

l2cluster• 5 years ago

And my favorite, pywal (https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal), which generates color schemes from an image.

chubot• 5 years ago

This huge bash program can also be run under Oil :)

Oil 0.8.pre4 - The Biggest Shell Programs in the World http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/04/release-0.8.pre4.html#t...

(or at least it could as of a year ago)

2OEH8eoCRo02• 5 years ago

Somewhat off topic but what terminal is this:

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/82b03feab20083a17944229ea...

I've only ever used whatever the default terminal is so this seems fancy. Looks nice.

soberpeach• 5 years ago

It shows xfce4-terminal

2OEH8eoCRo02• 5 years ago

Oh. I see.

ducktective• 5 years ago

I also use Xfce4-terminal but that is not its default theme. Pretty much any modern terminal emulator can be tweaked to have a purple background...

BanazirGalbasi• 5 years ago

The fancy appearance is probably due to user customizations. Simply changing the terminal font to one you like better and changing the background from pure black to another color (while keeping it dark) makes a big difference on appearance. The rest is probably window decorations, which means tweaking your WM theme. [r/unixporn](https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn) has a lot of good examples, and most people share dotfiles for you to borrow from.

rashil2000• 5 years ago

There's a pure PowerShell version[0] of this, for Windows, called winfetch. The repository also has a batch alternative for systems not supporting PowerShell.

[0] https://github.com/kiedtl/winfetch

normac2• 5 years ago

I feel like this should be a bunch of files that are concatenated in the makefile, not one giant 10,000SLOC script. Otherwise it seems pretty organized and looks like it's following bash best practices.

infogulch• 5 years ago

osquery is a related open source cross-platform system information tool that exposes everything through sql syntax. The scope of information you can query for is enormous: https://osquery.io/schema/4.9.0/

Neofetch: Command-line system information tool written in bash

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