eshell-info-banner.el

• Introduction
• Table of Contents
• Installation
• Customizing
• My computer doesn’t have a battery, will this still work?
• Contributing
• 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!

Table of Contents   TOC_2_gh

• Introduction
• Installation
• Customizing
• My computer doesn’t have a battery, will this still work?
• 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)

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.

Contributing

See /phundrak/eshell-info-banner.el/src/commit/e3461e6f99dd6c1f6986f56d493e608af8f6e9b9/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.