Swedish student Thomas Eriksson says a lot of advanced computer usage is still best done from the terminal. Given that, he’s developed Bashish to provide a more useful and beautiful terminal environment.
Bashish is a theme engine for the console, providing themes with different colors, fonts, and cool-looking graphics. The name Bashish is a play on bash (the Bourne Again SHell), the hash symbol (# – the root indicator in bash and tcsh), and hashish. Think of it as an addictive terminal theme utility. But it’s not just eye candy – Bashish can also provide useful visual feedback. For instance, it can change colors, font, transparency, and background image on a per-application basis.
In the latest version, released last week, Eriksson says, “I’ve tried to make the terminal even more useful with visual clues and providing information the users may actually need. For instance, the directory displayer can have different colors for directory separators (‘/’) and the actual directory names. It also chops off paths if they become too long.
“You can do a similar thing when displaying time; note the ‘:’ in different colors than the numbers in the screenshot below. Additionally, a user may not only specify the color, but also set the title and a string in the prompt, so you can name the terminals after whatever task you’re doing inside them.
“Yet another neat feature is that several prompts display the branch/revision status of popular revision control systems (git, svn, bzr, hg, and cvs).”
Bashish is a mature project. “I’m guessing the 2.2.x series will be a long-timer unless something radical happens,” Eriksson says. “I’m thinking of hacking together some more themes and release them with Bashish. When releases will happen is highly dependent on my current motivation and social commitments. :)”
Eriksson doesn’t need any help with the core programming, but he’d appreciate contributions of creative themes with ASCII/ANSI-art. “I think the m0an and fade themes are my favorites, even though m0an was contributed ages ago by Ratdog, and fade was made available a long time ago in the now defunct BashPrompt project by Rob Current.”
If you’d like to design a theme, Eriksson recommends you start by looking at fade as a model for a simple theme, conda/box if you want to write text between the prompt and the bottom of the screen, and c64 if you want to create a retro theme (“which actually are not that practical since they kill the scrollback history, but they give quite a nostalgic look”). If you have any ideas for Eriksson, post a comment on one of the project’s SourceForge forums.