eshell-info-banner.el is a utility for creating an informative banner, akin to fish_greeting but for Eshell. But an image is worth a thousand words, let’s see how it looks like:

/phundrak/eshell-info-banner.el/media/commit/48470a4b85456d655f30431a7e1f52b6410eee22/img/screenshot.png — Screenshot of the default Eshell information banner

This will be displayed every time you open a new Eshell instance, or if you invoke eshell-info-banner from it.

This package is geared towards Linux in particular, I am pretty sure it will not work on Windows, and there will probably be bugs on macOS. PR are welcome if you want to fix that!

Table of Contents TOC_2_gh

Introduction
Installation
Customizing
My computer doesn’t have a battery, will this still work?
Advice for Windows users
Contributing
License

Installation

A couple of options are available for installing eshell-info-banner.el. The first one is to clone the repository in your load-path and add the following to your .emacs or your init.el:

  (require 'eshell-info-banner)
  (add-hook 'eshell-banner-load-hook 'eshell-info-banner-update-banner)

If you use use-package only, you can then install it like so:

  (use-package eshell-info-banner
    :ensure t
    :defer t
    :load-path "~/path/to/where/you/cloned/it/eshell-info-banner.el/"
    :hook (eshell-banner-load . eshell-info-banner-update-banner))

In my case, I prefer using use-package with straight:

  (use-package eshell-info-banner
    :ensure t
    :defer t
    :straight (eshell-info-banner :type git
                                  :host github
                                  :repo "phundrak/eshell-info-banner.el")
    :hook (eshell-banner-load . eshell-info-banner-update-banner))

I personally also added :build t in the straight recipe to ensure Emacs compiles my package, both to .elc and .eln files (I am on Emacs 28.0, feature/native-comp got merged into master!)

There is probably a similar way to install it with pure straight.el or quelpa, but I’m not knowledgable enough for that, feel free to create a PR to add some more installation instructions!

There is currently no plans of making this package available on MELPA or non-gnu elpa.

Customizing

A couple of variables can be edited by the user in order to configure eshell-info-banner.el:

eshell-info-banner-partition-prefixes: Filter for which mountpoints are to be shown to the user. By default, only partitions mounted on a filesystem (as displayed by the command df -Hl) prefixed by /dev are shown, but you can modify it by adding other prefixes to this list. For instance, to detect ZFS roots, you can set its value to ("/dev" "zroot"). Default value: ("/dev")
eshell-info-banner-shorten-path-from: Maximum length of the mount path of a partition before it gets abbreviated. Set it to ridiculous numbers in order to disable it (something like 1000 should be more than enough). Default value: 7
eshell-info-banner-width: Minimum width of the banner. Be aware the banner will automatically select the minimal width required to display everything it wants to display if eshell-info-banner-width is too small. Default value: 80
eshell-info-banner-progress-bar-char: Character to fill the progress bar with. Default value: =
eshell-info-banner-warning-percentage: Percentage from which the level should be displayed as a warning. Default value: 75
eshell-info-banner-critical-percentage: Percentage from which the level should be displayed as critical. Default value: 90
eshell-info-banner-tramp-aware: When using Eshell through TRAMP, you can decide whether eshell-info-banner will display information about the remote system you are connected to or only display information about your local system. To achieve this, set eshell-info-banner-tramp-aware to t to display information on the remote system or to nil to keep local information only. Default value: t
eshell-info-banner-use-duf: Whether or not to use duf. duf is a better replacement for df and should be more platform-agnostic than the latter. I also suspect this implementation will be faster than the one with df, since there is very few string manipulation with duf compared to the implementations with df. Default value: t if duf is found on the system, nil otherwise
eshell-info-banner-duf-executable: Path to your duf executable. If duf is not found by default by Emacs, you can override eshell-info-banner-use-duf with t and specify the path to duf with this custom variable. Default value: duf

Don’t like the colors used by the package? They should follow by default your theme, but you can customize the following faces:

eshell-info-banner-background-face: Used for filling the empty part of progress bars
eshell-info-banner-normal-face: Used for filling the progress bar when on normal levels
eshell-info-banner-warning-face: Used for filling the progress bar when on warning levels
eshell-info-banner-critical-face: Used for filling the progress bar when on critical levels

My computer doesn’t have a battery, will this still work?

As you can see, one line shows you your battery level. Il will start to warn you in a reverse way compared to the other progress bars, as it should for battery levels –a fully charged battery at 100% is not at a critical level, but at 0% it would be.

However, you might be on a desktop or any kind of computer that does not have a battery, so… what do? Don’t worry, Emacs will automatically detect whether you have a battery or not and will only display this line if you have one. If you don’t have a battery, the only difference is you will have one less line than laptop users.

Advice for Windows users

Currently, the partitions detection is done only with the duf command-line utility. If you want a list of your partitions, I strongly encourage you to install it on your system. See https://github.com/muesli/duf#windows.

Contributing

See /phundrak/eshell-info-banner.el/src/commit/48470a4b85456d655f30431a7e1f52b6410eee22/CONTRIBUTING.org.

License

eshell-info-banner.el is available under the GNU GPL-3.0 license. You can find the full text in LICENSE.md.

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eshell-info-banner.el

Introduction