eshell-info-banner.el

• Introduction
• Installation
• Customizing
• My computer doesn’t have a battery, will this still work?
• Upcoming changes
  • Better support for other OSes
• License

Introduction

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:

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!

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)

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

(use-package eshell-info-banner
  :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

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.

Upcoming changes

Here are some upcoming changes I hope I’ll make in the future. If you see a feature still hasn’t been implemented and you wish to implement it, don’t hesitate to contribute and submit a PR!

Better support for other OSes

Displaying the OS name only works on Linux systems that have an /etc/os-release file and df available in Eshell’s path, or on Windows at least partially —i.e. it will probably not work correctly on macOS and on exotic Linux distributions. This should be fixed someday. (And *BSD maybe?) See this issue.

License

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