Polishing the Terminal Window with Bashish COLORCOLOR MYMY SHELLSHELL

LINUXUSER Bashish

Polishing the terminal window with Bashish COLORCOLOR MYMY SHELLSHELL

Bashish adds a dash of style to the command line.

BY FRANK WIEDUWILT Orchidpoet, Fotolia

f you are a regular command line To install a functional version of Bash- You can now launch a new shell by user, you may appreciate the spartan ish, you will need a recent version of the entering the exec bash command. The Iappearance of the terminal window. Bourne Again Shell (Bash), version 2.04 new shell will reflect the default Bashish But for occasional shell users, or readers or newer. You’ll also need a recent ver- settings, which call for a light blue font who would prefer a more playful ap- sion of your terminal program. on a black background. To remove Bash- proach, Bashish [1] opens a treasure We were unable to use Bashish with ish, just launch the program with the trove of options. Bashish gives your ter- the Rxvt version included with Mandriva --uninstall flag. minal window a colorful ASCII graphic 2006. The terminal program crashed background. with most of the themes we tried. In Shell Colors Bashish lets you liven up the appear- contrast, the version of Bashish provided Bashish groups shell enhancements in ance of terminal programs such as with Ubuntu 6.06 worked without any what are called themes. A theme in- Gnome Terminal, Xterm, Rxvt, Rxvt trouble, as did the Rxvt version with cludes the data for the background Unicode, Aterm, Mlterm, and the Linux Suse 10.1. After we switched to the Rx- graphic and the prompt. To launch the Console, and you can change a limited vt Unicode version available on the shell with a theme, first run the Bash- range of settings such as the title bar in web [3], Bashish finally worked on ishtheme tool. The initial dialog asks the Konsole KDE terminal emulation Mandriva. you to specify whether you will be using window. Bashish developer, Thomas Er- the prompt for the shell in general, or iksson, is planning additional support Installation whether you would simply like to apply for Konsole. He recommends using the To install Bashish, first unpack the the changes to a specific program. bash shell, although the program will source code archive, bashish-2.0.5.1.tar. If you are just redressing the shell, se- support other shells such as Zsh and gz, and then go through the normal hat- lect the prompt theme at the command Tcsh. trick of ./configure, make, and make prompt entry from the menu. A list If possible, the terminal should sup- install to build and install. After com- appears, which lets you specify the port the Unicode character set. Many of pleting the basic setup, give the com- theme details. After deciding on a design the themes that come with the Bashish mand bashish in a terminal program. and possibly modifying the background package include characters such as lines The tool will now ask you which shell color, you can quit the configuration or playing card symbols that are not sup- you prefer and will configure the shell to program. The terminal window should ported by legacy code pages such as automatically load Bashish next time look completely different at this point 8859-1 or 8859-15. you launch it. (Figure 1).

86 ISSUE 72 NOVEMBER 2006 WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM Bashish LINUXUSER

Figure 2: A Rxvt terminal masquerading as the legacy DOS operating system.

Figure 1: The Rxvt Unicode terminal emulation window with the from displaying After completing your modifications, Urbandawn theme. on screen. The Ur- change to the directory with the theme bandawn theme files and type bashishtheme save. If you It is worth your while to experiment shown in Figure 1 occasionally pre- have created a new theme, Bashish will with the backgrounds that come with vented data output on the terminal. ask where you would like to save the the distribution. Nostalgia fans might Bashish also miscalculates the size of theme you just created. like to check out the prompts with the the terminal window from time to time, computer/ prefix. For example, you can leaving you with just part of the program Conclusions change the prompt to look like a DOS output. Bashish adds color and variety to the prompt; Bashish even converts the Some programs, such as Playmp3list, daily gray of the terminal window. The slashes in pathnames to backslashes will not launch on any Bashish theme Bashish program is still far from bug- (Figure 2). apart from the default. Playmp3list free; some Bashish themes prevent data In the blobs of color that Bashish dis- crashed with a segmentation fault no output on the terminal, and some pro- tributes between the prompt and normal matter what other themes we tried. And grams just crash at the sight of Bashish. program output, you can be more selec- the text mode browser Elinks died, refus- Another problem is that the Bashish pro- tive by assigning themes to specific ap- ing to launch if we had enabled a Bash- gram documentation is disorganized, plications. To do so, select the applica- ish theme. making it difficult to create your own tion theme selected application item in themes unless you are willing to experi- the Bashish theme main menu. This op- Do-It-Yourself Themes ment. ■ tion takes you to a dialog where you can In a default installation from the source enter the name of the required program code, the theme files are located in /usr/ INFO and then select one of the themes. Bash- local/share/bashish/themes. The binary [1] Bashish: ish will now save a launcher script that elements are stored in separate TGZ ar- http:// bashish. sourceforge. net uses the program name in the program’s chives with a suffix of bt; of course, you path. can’t edit files in this format. If you wish [2] Dialog: http:// hightek. org/ dialog/ When the program is launched, the to modify a theme, start by enabling the [3] Rxvt Unicode: http:// software. launcher script first adds the selected theme in Bashishtheme. You will then schmorp. de/ pkg/ rxvt-unicode theme to the shell before going on to the discover the theme components in the [4] Bashish documentation: http:// launch the software. When you quit the ~/.bashish/bt/cache/ directory. Now bashish. sourceforge. net/ doc. html program, the script reinstates the previ- copy the text files to a new directory and ous shell status. The launcher script will load them for editing with an editor that not prevent from you from passing in pa- supports Unicode. Frank Wieduwilt rameters to the software you are launch- The Theme file contains details of the originally studied ing. author and the colors that you will be history and has been working for Bashish stores launcher scripts in the using; Prompt.bash gives you the prompt several years as a ./bashish/launcher directory below a us- definition, including the graphics that freelance technical er’s home directory. Themes for specific Bashish will display on screen. The author for several applications are located in ./basish/bt/ Bashish commands are documented at publishing compa- app. Bashish stores a directory with the [4]. The documentation lacks structure nies in Berlin, Germany, where he name of the program. and has some gaps, which sometimes writes manuals for database soft- Unfortunately, neither the themes nor leaves you with no alternative but trial THEAUTHOR ware solutions. Frank is a regular the prompts were particularly stable. and error. The easiest approach is to use contributor to Linux Magazine, spe- Some prompts prevent even the output an existing theme as a starting point for cializing in SOHO topics such as of- fice and graphics programs. of simple commands such as less or ps your experiments.