Code & Craft

Linked-Planetify your terminal with fastfetch

For those of you that are unaware, fastfetch is a command-line tool to display detailed information about your system in an easy-to-comprehend format. Remember Neofetch, which used to do this (and screenfetch before it)? Unfortunately, Neofetch is no longer being updated.

Patrick Louis

21 Mar 2025 — 2 min read

Fastfetch also offers a variety of configuration options that impact what information is displayed and how. By default it will display the information alongside the ASCII-art logo of your OS-distribution, but like basically anything, this can be changed.

The default look of fastfetch, sporting the Arch-logo as ascii-art

I had the idea of applying some styling to it and figured the new logo would be a really good fit for it. So I grabbed a text-less version of the logo and turned it to ascii-art using jp2a

The logo-version I used

One jp2a logo.png > logo.txt later I was presented with the glorious ascii-version of it.

                                    .
                                  .
                 .......        .    .
           .................. .    .
         ....................    .
       ....................   ..
      ...................   ..   ..
     ..................   ..   .....
    ............  ...   ..   .......
    ..........   ..   .    .........
    ........   ..   .    ...........
     .....   .    .    .............
     ...   .    .   ...............
         .    .   ................
       .    .   .................
    ..   ..   .................
  ..   ..    ...............
 .   ..
   ..

In my first attempt I tried using the --color option of jp2a but the original color of the image was barely visible on my terminal background, so I resorted to omitting the --color option.

Now that we have our prerequisites in place, it's time to start configuring fastfetch. Let's first get ourselves a blank config file by running fastfetch --gen-config

The resulting file will reside in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fastfetch/config.jsonc and should look somewhat like this

{
  "$schema": "https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch/raw/dev/doc/json_schema.json",
  "modules": [
    "title",
    "separator",
    "os",
    "host",
    "kernel",
    "uptime",
    "packages",
    "shell",
    "display",
    "de",
    "wm",
    "wmtheme",
    "theme",
    "icons",
    "font",
    "cursor",
    "terminal",
    "terminalfont",
    "cpu",
    "gpu",
    "memory",
    "swap",
    "disk",
    "localip",
    "battery",
    "poweradapter",
    "locale",
    "break",
    "colors"
  ]
}

Adding our logo is pretty straight-forward, we need to add a logo-property defining our text-file as source. I will also set the color for the logo to blue to at least resemble the original color.

{
  ...
  "logo": {
      "source": "~/.config/fastfetch/logo.txt",
      "color": {
          "1": "blue"
      }
  },
  ...
}

This looks pretty good already, but in my opinion the right hand-side needs some love to better match the aesthetic.