pokesay

README

pokesay

Print pokemon in the CLI! An adaptation of the classic "cowsay"

• pokesay
  • One-line installs
  • Usage
  • How it works
  • Building binaries
    • On your host OS
    • In docker
  • Developing
    • Testing
  • TODO

---

---

One-line installs

(These commands can also be used to update your existing pokesay)

• OSX / darwin

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash darwin amd64
  

• OSX / darwin (M1)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash darwin arm64
  

• Linux x64

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash linux amd64
  

• Android ARM64 (Termux)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash android arm64
  

• Windows x64 (.exe)

  bash -c "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmck-code/pokesay/master/build/scripts/install.sh)" bash windows amd64
  

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Usage

Just pipe some text! e.g.

echo yolo | pokesay

To see it every time you open a terminal, add it to your .bashrc file!
(This requires that you have fortune installed)

echo 'fortune | pokesay' >> $HOME/.bashrc

Note: The pokesay tool is intended to only be used with piped text input from STDIN, entering text by typing (or other methods) might not work as expected!

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How it works

This project extends on the original fortune | cowsay, a simple command combo that can be added to your .bashrc to give you a random message spoken by a cow every time you open a new shell.

 ☯ ~ fortune | cowsay
 ______________________________________
/ Hollywood is where if you don't have \
| happiness you send out for it.       |
|                                      |
\ -- Rex Reed                          /
 --------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

As a personal project, this has been lovingly over-engineered with a focus on the lowest latency possible, so that it doesn't slow down your terminal experience.

1. These pokemon sprites used here are sourced from the awesome repo msikma/pokesprite

   

2. All of these sprites are converted into a form that can be rendered in a terminal (unicode characters and colour control sequences) by the img2xterm tool, found at rossy/img2xterm

3. Use some go tools (encoding/gob and go:embed) to generate a go source code file that encodes all of the converted unicode sprites as gzipped text and some search-optimised data structures.

4. Finally, this is built with the main CLI logic in pokesay.go into an single executable that can be easily popped into a directory in the user's $PATH

If all you are after is installing the program to use, then there are no dependencies required! Navigate to the Releases and download the latest binary.

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Building binaries

On your host OS

Dependencies: Go 1.19

You'll have to install a golang version that matches the go.mod, and ensure that other package dependencies are installed (see the dockerfile for the dependencies)

# Generate binary asset files from the cowfiles
./build/build_assets.sh

# Finally, build the pokesay tool
go build pokesay.go

In docker

Dependencies: docker

In order to re/build the binaries from scratch, along with all the cowfile conversion, use the handy Makefile tasks

make -C build build/docker build/assets build/release

This will produce 4 executable bin files inside the build/bin directory, and a heap of binary asset files in build/assets.

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Developing

Testing

Run tests with

go test -v ./test/

# or, with debug information printed
DEBUG=test go test -v ./test/

---

TODO

• Short-term
• Longer-term
• Completed
  • Make the category struct faster to load - currently takes up to 80% of the execution time
  • Store metadata and names in a more storage-efficient manner
  • Import japanese names from data/pokemon.json
  • Fix bad whitespace stripping when building assets
  • List all names
  • Make data structure to hold categories, names and pokemon
  • Increase speed
  • Improve categories to be more specific than shiny/regular