Customizing Neofetch - Everything You Should Know

[Music] neofetches a sure sign that you've been posting to Unix porn or at least that's what I've kind of always thought about it and the thing is that a lot of people use neofetch most people don't really do anything with it they just use the standard configuration file and go about their day they don't think about their Neo fetch all that much now if you are a themer you've probably thought about it more than most and you have discovered that there is in fact a configuration file that you can do all sorts of things with so today what I wanted to do was take you through some of the stuff that neofetch can do inside of its configuration file and just kind of show you how extensible it really is so let's go ahead and jump into that but before we do if you leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it it really does help the channel so neofetch looks like this if you've ever seen a terminal on Unix porn it probably has had neofetch inside it now this is not the standard configuration of neofetch this is my personal configuration that was created by someone on my Discord server this is for whenever I'm doing a challenge I can have the challenge kind of counting down inside of my terminal it's really cool and you can kind of see from this that it is quite extensible because the standard one looks like this there's nothing wrong with the standard way that neofetch looks but it is highly customizable so if you are interested in changing the way that it looks I'm going to show you some of the things that the configuration file can do so the standard one has an ASCII are on the left hand side and on the right hand side it has an output of some of your system information so it has the operating system the host which is usually going to be your motherboard for some reason and then it has the kernel uptime packages shell resolution desktop environment Window Manager theme icons terminal CPU GPU memory things like that right and sometimes you'll find configuration files that have other things as well so things like the currently playing song through MPD or ncmpc PBE or something like that or things like the IP address now if you're going to be using someone else's configuration file you always want to kind of make sure that you've read the configuration file to make sure that it doesn't have information you don't want out there so if you don't want your public IP out there maybe you want to change that line so the standard configuration file once you've run neofetch for the first time is located in dot config neofetch which is this path right here now if I do an ALICE here you'll see that I actually have one called config.default the standard configuration file is config.conf but that is the one that I'm using for my regular neofetch which looks like this right so I'm going to show you the the default configuration file which looks like this now this initial section the print info section is the section that determines the things that are outputted when you run neofetch so each of these lines here correspond with a line in the print info section so if you wanted to make it so that the host isn't displayed you can delete that or you can or you can comment it out so comments are with a a hashed set a hashtag so just like that if you wanted to make sure that the host wasn't displayed you could comment it out or delete that line same thing if you wanted to have the window manager theme gone or the icons and themes and the terminal font whatever you can delete those and it also gives you options for things that aren't there by default that you can enable so for example the disk section would display free space on your disk the battery would show the the free percentage or the charge percentage on your battery the song will display the currently playing song when neofetches run it also has several other options as well now you can if you wanted to create your own items to display here and I'll show you some of that later on once I show you my actual configuration file but let's go ahead and jump into the rest of the config here each of these lines has a corresponding section below it so for example the kernel section right here gives you some options over how the kernel is displayed whether it's displayed at all whether it is shown regular or in shorthand and things like that some sections are kind of light on options like the kernel whereas things like the memory has to have several different options that you can configure so how it's displayed in terms of percentage whether you're displaying it in megabytes kilobytes or gigabytes things like that if you go to the CPU section the CPU section has many different options for you to configure things like how the actual CPU is displayed whether it shows the brand whether it shows the CPU speed and so on and so forth there's actually several different options here will also allow you to show the temperature so if you wanted to show the temperature of that particular CPU it could do so same thing for the GPU if you wanted to show the GP GPU information you could do that and there are several different options here for you to configure how that is displayed now what I wanted to do next was actually show you a couple of the sections that I considered the most customizable for me because honestly what you're wanting to do probably is change the ASCII art now the ASCII art here by default is usually the logo of the distribution that you're using and it doesn't have to be that way so if you go down and search for backend now this section here is dedicated to all the things how it displays that image on the left hand side so the first part is the back end now by default it is set to ASCII and if you are you wanting to display your own custom ASCII art you'll leave this as ASCII but there are several other options for you to choose from most of them are going to be terminal specific or display ASCII art in certain different ways the one that I'm going to show you today is going to be Kitty but it's Kit is going to work the same as w3m and uberz basically what this allows you to do is display your own image instead of an ASCII art so I'm going to change this image back in here to Kitty because I'm using kitty it's the terminal that I'm using if you're not using Kitty you can use w3m which is going to do the same thing or ubersug which you then have to install usually w3m is already installed the other the ubersug probably is not there is a problem with that particular program in that it is abandoned but there's one called ubersug plus plus which is currently being developed and is available in quite a few repositories I know it's in the Open Season repositories and you can download it that and it actually works drop-in replacement for ubersug so you could use that instead so once you've changed the image back end you go down here to image source Now by by default is set to Auto and basically what Auto means is that it will pull in the ASCII art for the distribution that you're using so for me I'm going to actually change this to a path to an image so I'm going to do like so images and then favicon.png like so and now I'm going to open up a terminal now it still showed my own configuration file because it's that's what's default for me on my system so so if I wanted to run from this particular configuration file I'll zoom in here so you can actually see I'll run neofetch dash dash config and then the path to the configuration file so this is useful for if you want to have different configuration files for different things right if you have different setups for whatever you can point neofetch to a specific configuration file so in my case it's going to be.config if I can spell and config neofetch config.default is the one that I wanted to show and then if you run that you can see now that it uses my icon instead of the ASCII art so that's how you actually go and use your own image instead of the default and that's I think probably the customization that most people want to do you can also have it so that if you wanted to change your own to a your own ASCII art you could do that like I said you would leave the back end set to ASCII and then you'd point the image source to to a text file with that asciar inside of it so you just create a text file paste the ASCII art that you've created inside of it and then point image source to that particular path and then it would show your own personal ASCII art instead of the default one so I'm going to actually go here and I'm going to undo that and I'm going to undo that and then I'm going to show you the next thing so by default there are actually I'm going to go and close this so that this looks a little bit better there are actually some options for how that default asciar is displayed so the probably the best example of this here is this section here now by default ASCII underscore distro is set to Auto now if you wanted to use some other distros ASCII or you could do so so if I wanted to say all right right now I'm going to open through the Tumbleweed but I could change this to Ubuntu like so and then run that thing here and it would actually show the Ubuntu logo even though I'm on open Suza I could do that if I wanted to do that for some really weird reason but really what this section is for is that in some cases distros have Alternatives so if you wanted to for example use the open small version so by default the ASCII art looks like this if I change this to open Souza if I can spell good which I can't underscore small and save this and then run this again you can see that it actually changes to a different ASCII Arc and all of these distributions right here have options for smaller versions of the ASCII art so if you wanted to change to that small version you'd come to this section here do ASCII underscore distro change it to the distro you want and then underscore small now obviously not all distributions have small versions but you could create one and point it to your own file if you wanted to the rest of the configuration file at least most of it is going to be dedicated to color so by default the Neo fetch will act actually inherit your colors from your terminal and I find that that's usually the best way of doing things but sometimes you want to get creative and create your own every single option that is displayed can be changed with the colors inside of this particular file so you can change what the color is for the ASCII you can change the color for all the display output of your system you can change the colors of the lines for the color palette as well all that stuff is configured right here inside of the configuration file and then there are some options for if you are using an image so if you are having problems where your Custom Image isn't showing you can change it so that the terminal will constantly redraw it over and over again that you can also change it so that the thumbnail is in a different position a different spot you can change the crop mode so this is where you change the size of the image that you put in there and they're just different a whole bunch of different options here in in the configuration file so I highly recommend if you are going to be interested in customizing your neofetches to hop into the default configuration file and just kind of play around because each section as you can see is very well commented it tells you exactly what it does it shows you all of the potential options that you can use for that particular option and then a lot of times it'll actually give you a link to more information if you need it so if there's a lot more information to be had you can click on the link and actually go get that information if you are customizing this and you just kind of mess around just know that if you make some changes make backups of the configurations that you like that way if you need to go back you don't have to go kind of hunting for those particular options because the one thing that I will say about this is that the configuration file is long now granted a good probably 50 of it is comments so you could shorten that up by taking the comments out but it's almost 900 lines long so it does have some impediment to actually finding things if you don't know what you're are looking for so that's the default configuration file let me show you mine so again this was created by someone on my Discord server and I'm just going to show you some of the things that neofetch is actually capable of Beyond what's in the default configuration file so you can set variables inside of neofetch you can use let and diff to perform calculations and then display that output so in this case the configuration file that I'm using is displaying the time until my challenge ends and the number of days that I've been using this particular distro so that does that and then in the print info section which is the same as the other one it just displays all of that information but in a very stylized format so it has all these lines and has the icons so someone asked in one of my shorts is how do you put icons inside of the neofetch can think well this is how all it does is it just uses the info which is we saw before in the default configuration file and then you just paste the icon that you want wherever you want it to be so if you want to be next to oh the OS you just put the icon there same thing with the D window manager has an icon there right you can put as many icons as you want you just go you would put those right in this file now if you wanted to find those icons you would go to something like nerdfoncer awesome fun awesome or something like that get the icon there and paste them here now your terminal does have to be using that font in order for those icons to show up so if you're going to use a nerd font you should use a nurse nerd font inside of the terminal so that those icons will actually display so another really cool thing that it can do is that if you wanted to you can use other things like bash built-ins inside of the neofetch configuration file so you can use Echo here August here which is not a built-in it's on it's its own program but you can use awk you can use print and all that stuff and it just uses the variables that were set above to perform operations and display specific information so if you wanted to use some bash script like operations you can do so you can even use if statements if you wanted to do do such a thing so the limitations on the neo-fetch configuration file are really up to your skill level so if you wanted to do any of this stuff here all this stuff was beyond me someone else created this but you can see that it allows you to basically do whatever you want which is pretty cool so the last thing that I wanted to show you was this particular project right here it's called neocat now neocat is a neo-fetch theme pack and they have I'm not actually sure how many that they have so far it's like 30 or 40 different neofetch themes that you can choose from so if you were to download this repository which I have done you can see that there are large seams and and small themes now basically what you want to do is before you even get into this you want to go into your dot config neofetch and back up your current neofiche configuration file so I'm going to cpconfig.com into config.mine so that I actually have that because if you run this script in the so let's just go into the small things here so there here are all the small things that they have so if you wanted to try these you just do dot slash start.sh and it's going to ask you which one that you want and you can just try these so I'm going to try the let's say the giraffe ones I'm going to type in 21 and then it's actually going to run that particular neofetch and it has what it has done is it's copied that configuration file that gives you the output of a draft into the the place where it goes so indot config slash neofetric copies that so if I were to run that again and type in 13 for the truck it would then run the thing and it will show you the truck right and it has like I said a couple dozen different configuration files but you'll want to make sure you save your old one uh so that it doesn't get overwritten because it does not do a backup on its own you're forced to do that backup on your own uh but neocat basically just gives you an option of some pre-configured neofetch configurations that you can use so you don't have to do anything on your own I've used this for quite a while if you've saw my videos a couple weeks ago I was using one with a little kitty cat that one came from neocat as well so you could use that there are small ones there's large ones and there's quite a few options for you so that is neofetch and like I said that was not a comprehensive line by line explanation over what the configuration file can do but I've showed you some of the options that it can do I hope that this video was interesting if you liked it make sure you leave a like on the video I really do appreciate that if you have comments on neofets you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on Mastodon obviously those links will be in the description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com the Linux cast links for PayPal and YouTube will be in the video description as well if you want to support me there thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now so I think it's a very very much free support I truly do appreciate it you guys are all absolutely awesome thank you so very much thank you everybody for watching I'll see you next time [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Linux Cast

Views: 10,851

Keywords: linux, open source, apps, the linux cast, thelinuxcast, neofetch, linux neofetch, neofetch customization, customize neofetch, theme neofetch, neofetch theme, neofetch themes, neofetch alternative

Id: Ov3yi-9jbFI

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023