eshell-info-banner.el

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:

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

• Introduction
• Recent Breaking Changes
  • ~0.8.1~
  • ~0.7.0~
• Installation
• Customizing
  • Custom Variables
  • Faces
• My computer doesn’t have a battery, will this still work?
• Advice for Windows users
• Contributing
• License

Recent Breaking Changes

0.8.1

Version 0.8.1 removes the optional argument REMOTE from eshell-info-banner--executable-find. It now only acts according to the user’s preference set with eshell-info-banner-tramp-aware.

0.7.0

Version 0.7.0 renames several functions to conform with the Elisp Coding Conventions.

The following function was removed:

• eshell-info-banner--get-memory/darwin

The following alias (replacing an old function) was removed:

• eshell-info-banner--get-memory/bsd

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 and install the package from MELPA, you can then install it like so:

(use-package eshell-info-banner
  :ensure t
  :defer t
  :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 (:build t)
  :hook (eshell-banner-load . eshell-info-banner-update-banner))

You can just use :straight t if you do not want to ensure the package gets compiled by Emacs.

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!

Customizing

Custom Variables

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

eshell-info-banner-file-size-flavor

This variable reflects the possible values passed to the function file-size-human-readable. It can hold one of these three values:

• nil
• si
• iec

Since the value iec generates longer file size prefixes, progress bars become slightly shorter. For more details on this option, see the documentation of file-size-human-readable.

Default value: nil

Faces

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 CONTRIBUTING.org.

License

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