Terminalize your Prompt

-

Introduction


As a Software Developer, it is often productive to use the terminal. I am used to the terminal so much and spend most of my time on the terminal. To enhance your experience on your terminal I strongly recommend the @ohmyzsh to be part of your terminal. It has been a few years now, not sure from when, I cannot imagine a terminal without @ohmyzsh. There are a lot of details found on Oh My Zsh - a delightful & open source framework for Zsh please feel free to visit and be prepared to be awesome-struck.


Here is my Terminal that I had posted on my Twitter a while ago https://twitter.com/reflexdemon/status/1216679064565702656

Let's get started with awesomeness!


Here I would recommend you to make sure you have the wget tool. This is a utility from the GNU Free Software Foundation. Visit Wget to make sure it is in your ecosystem.

There is another very important tool that you will need is the jq. That helps in parsing the json output.

Chuck Noris Jokes


Let's get the legendary Chuck Noris jokes part of your terminal. I did come across a database that is having a list of Chuck Noris Jokes and it has an public API. That rang a bell on me, why not have this quote show up on my terminal. That sounded a lot of fun.

Here is The Internet Chuck Norris Database | A free and open collection of Chuck Norris jokes and facts, ready for you to use.


Speaking of using the database, they have a very cool API that we can use. The details of the API can be found at http://www.icndb.com/api/. This is really cool stuff that we can use to make our terminal spell some jokes.


Here is the output from the terminal.
$ curl -s http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random\?limitTo\=\[nerdy\] | jq
{
  "type": "success",
  "value": {
    "id": 552,
    "joke": "Chuck Norris knows the value of NULL, and he can sort by it too.",
    "categories": [
      "nerdy"
    ]
  }
}



It is really cool to give a small smile when we open the terminal. So I have added below command to crontab
$ wget -O ~/.icndb "http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random?limitTo=[nerdy]"

Here is the entry to fetch jokes every 30 minutes to your system.
*/30 * * * * wget  -O ~/.icndb "http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random?limitTo=[nerdy]" >/dev/null 2>&1


Now that you have this on your system, it is a matter of displaying it on the terminal. Please add this to your ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc.
cat ~/.icndb | jq ".value.joke"



This sure will give a smile to open a new terminal window.

Weather on the prompt


Now that we have the jokes from legend we can get a bit serious by adding Weather to the prompt. I really like the weather on the prompt that is such a cool feature to have.

Similar to what we did above we will be adding a crontab entry and then add the content to the prompt. With this extra step of adding it to crontab helps in speeding up the prompt
Here is the entry to fetch weather every 30 minutes to your system.
*/30 * * * * wget  -O ~/.wttr "http://wttr.in/?0" >/dev/null 2>&1


Now that you have this on your system, it is a matter of displaying it on the terminal. Please add this to your ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc.
cat ~/.wttr


This sure will give a smile to open a new terminal window.

Next steps


What we have done is a foundation to making the prompt look cool. To make it Awesome, the possibilities are limitless. There are a lot of API out there on the internet and you should be able to make use of this and add to the endless possibilities. Please let me know what cool stuff you added to your prompt.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Java SSL/TLS Testing Tool: Cipher Suite

-
Image
Recently I was reading about the TLS/SSL and Ciphers. I was also interested to read about the Ciphers that are provided out of the box with JDK. This looked to me like this is something we take it for granted and do not do our due diligence when talking about the Ciphers. We often times leave those topic to our organization's network and security team. From my experience, it is a topic that all the developers leave it to the Sr. Developers and then the Sr. Developers pass it on to the Management. Guess what? It is not a sweet topic to discussion. To break this kind of symptom, I have choose to make it simple and want everyone to understand the complexity and importance of knowing this. Lets get started Before we wet our hands here is some basic information that you will require to know, Word Meaning Protocol A defined set of rules and regulations that determine how data is transmitted in telecommunications and computer networking SSL
Read more

PWA: Building and publishing a PWA in 15ish minutes using Angular 5 and Service Worker

-
Image
Introduction Here is an express start to your first PWA with service workers and a 100% score from lighthouse. I have taken it as a challenge to be able to present it to you so that you may be able to put your first pwa "hello world" app in 15ish minutes. What is PWA? Progressive web apps (PWAs) take traditional web sites/applications — with all of the advantages the web brings — and add a number of features that give them many of the user experience advantages of native apps. This set of docs tells you all you need to know. - Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Progressive If the above definition sounds interesting, then this is to get you kickstarted with PWA using Angular 5 and inspire you to build more PWAs. End of this post you should be able to build, host and publish a PWA and get motivated to read more about it. Ever since I read about PWAs It has intrested me like crazy. Before, you get excited about PWA, please look into the supported brow
Read more

Yarn and Angular-CLI

-
Background I have been thinking of a faster package management tool ever since I started using NPM (Node Package Manager). Please don’t mistake me having anything against NPM. I still love this package manager and I very much love the rich command-line that it came with. When it was created, it was really the leader and because of this NPM the whole JS world has seen a revolution. NPM surly was the spark to the revolution in the JS (Java Script) world. To make it clear for everyone why we needed a new package manager is because of the following challenges that we had with NPM, 1.      The Nested dependencies that was sometimes going in infinity loops. At times, it was impossible to delete files on the PC as the paths were too nested. 2.      Everything on the world had to depend on only one registry. https://www.npmjs.com/ 3.      Single threaded installation. The installation of the dependencies are single threaded. 4.      You are always expected to be online even i
Read more