TAO (The Art) of Unix Programming (and related systemic epiphanies)
This is a ruby-powered, ANSI colored, fortune-like program to espouse wisdom at
opportune moments, such as when you log in.
In every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. - Wittgenstein
It's mostly a personal collection, but contributions are welcome.
Installation
- Arch Linux:
yay -S taoup-git(replaceyaywith your favorite AUR helper) - Nix:
nix-env -iA nixos.taoup(ornix-env -iA nixpkgs.taoupwith nixpkgs on a non-Nix OS) - Other unix-like: Make sure you have
rubyandgeminstalled, rungem install ansithen./taoup.
Screenshots
Regular terminal (iTerm2).
Oldschool terminal
(cool-retro-term, or via homebrew: brew cask install cool-retro-term)
Getting wisdom at login
To display taoup output at login, use the taoup-fortune example script or try adding something similar in your .profile.
By default taoup assumes good taste and a black/dark terminal, for edge cases and lost causes use --whitetrash.
Special modes
There are four modes other than standard invocation:
--helpor--hshows brief command line help on invocation syntax--whitetrashconverts the otherwise attractive color scheme to be legible on light or white terminals--machinedrops any ANSI colors from the output (also respectsNO_COLORenvironment variable, see no-color.org)--fortuneconverts the wisdom to an assumed imitation of the fortune format. To make the resulting fortune format file available to the classicfortuneprogram (loses ANSI colors in output) you can runstrfileas follows:
taoup --fortune >taoup-fortunes
strfile taoup-fortunes taoup-fortunes.dat
fortune taoup-fortunes
Praise for taoup
- "I'm honored. :)" @jacquesm, HN user with ~200K karma, after being quoted in taoup
- "Taoup is in my zshrc startup, it's consistently fun/intelligent/thoughtful. Thanks for the continued maintenance
👍 , cheers." @ronjouch - We are now the top ranked fortune implementation on Github. Spread the word!