Awesome

Pokemon colorscripts

A script to print out images of pokemon to the terminal. Inspired by DT's colorscripts compilation

Table of contents

[[TOC]]

Description

Prints out colored unicode sprites of pokemon onto your terminal. Contains almost 900 pokemon from gen 1 to gen 8. Has all the pokemons you could ever want, including shinies (okay it doesn't have the different forms, but cut me some slack)

Visuals

Demo GIFs

Demo of the program being used

Demo of the program running on terminal startup.

Screenshots

Requirements

The program itself is just a shell script that prints out custom color formatted text files. So as long as you have a POSIX compliant shell like dash, bash, zsh etc. as your shell and have coreutils (might not be present on your system if using MacOs. See installation instructions for MacOS for more details), the script should work. You will however need a terminal with true color support, which most modern terminals have. More on terminals and color support can be found in this gist

Installation

On Arch or Arch based distros

The utility is available as an AUR package pokemon-colorscripts-git. You can install this manually or using an AUR helper. For manual installation, download the PKGBUILD file from this repository. Then run

makepkg -cf

which will create a .pkg.tar.zst file. Then run

sudo pacman -U <filename.pkg.tar.zst>

Or you can use an AUR Helper such as yay and run

yay -S pokemon-colorscripts-git

On other distros

Clone or download the repository

git clone https://gitlab.com/phoneybadger/pokemon-colorscripts.git

cd into the directory and run the install script

cd pokemon-colorscripts
sudo ./install.sh

Now the program should be installed. You can check this by running

pokemon-colorscripts

Which should print out the help page for the program

MacOS

Make sure coreutils are installed

brew install coreutils

Clone or download the repository

git clone https://gitlab.com/phoneybadger/pokemon-colorscripts.git

cd into the directory and run the install script

cd pokemon-colorscripts
sudo ./install.sh

Restart the terminal. Now the program should be installed. You can check this by running

pokemon-colorscripts

Which should print out the help page for the program

Usage

You can run the program from the command line to either display a pokemon of your choice by specifying the pokemon name or make it display a random pokemon.

Usage: pokemon-colorscripts [OPTION] [POKEMON NAME]
    "-h, --help, help" "Print this help." \
    "-l, --list, list" "Print list of all pokemon"\
    "-r, --random, random" "Show a random pokemon. This flag can optionally be
                    followed by a generation number or range (1-8) to show random
                    pokemon from a specific generation or range of generations.
                    The generations can be provided as a continuous range (eg. 1-3)
                    or as a list of generations (eg. 1 3 6)"\
    "-n, --name" "Select pokemon by name. Generally spelled like in the games.
                    a few exceptions are nidoran-f,nidoran-m,mr-mime,farfetchd,flabebe
                    type-null etc. Perhaps grep the output of --list if in
                    doubt. This flag can optionally be followed by -s or --shiny to print
                    the shiny version of the pokemon instead""

Example of printing out a specific pokemon

pokemon-colorscripts -n charizard

Example of printing out a specific shiny pokemon

pokemon-colorscripts -n spheal -s

Example of printing out a random pokemon

pokemon-colorscripts -r

Example of printing out a random pokemon from generation 1

pokemon-colorscripts -r 1

Example of printing out a random pokemon from generations 1-3

pokemon-colorscripts -r 1-3

Example of printing out a random pokemon from generations 1,3 and 6

pokemon-colorscripts -r 1 3 6

Some pokemon with spaces or periods or other special characters in their name might not be spelled as expected, some examples include:

farfetch'd -> farfetchd
mr.mime -> mr-mime

These are rare exceptions, and if required you can parse the --list page to see the names of all the pokemon.

Running on terminal startup

On Bash and ZSH

You can display a random pokemon whenever a terminal gets launched by adding the pokemon-colorscripts -r command to your .bashrc or .zshrc.

On Fish

If you have fish as your user shell you can display a random pokemon on terminal startup by overriding the fish_greeting in your config.fish

function fish_greeting
     pokemon-colorscripts -r
end

A more advaced setup combining multiple colorscripts can be found on pokemon-colorscripts#2

Location of the files

The program is located at usr/local/opt/pokemon-colorscripts/ with the script being symlinked to /usr/local/bin/

How it works

The program itself is a simple shell script that prints out text files corresponding to the relevant pokemon or a randomly selected pokemon. The textfiles formatted with appropriate colors can be found in the colorscripts folder. The sprites were taken from pokemondb and were converted into text files using a custom python script after some preprocessing. A simple script to scrape and download all the sprites, and a python script to convert these sprites into properly formatted and colored text files, they are also included in the repo and can be found in the generator_scripts folder.

Similar projects

pokemon-colorscripts is not the exclusive nor the first program to print out pokemon sprites to the terminal. You can check out these really cool projects as well

• pokeget
• pokeshell

more details and my thoughts on both projects can be found on similar_projects.md

Author

Phoney badger: https://gitlab.com/phoneybadger

License

The MIT License (MIT)