Neofetch is a simple command-line tool that displays an ASCII logo of the distribution along with a few system information in the terminal. It looks beautiful and you can easily show which distribution, desktop environment, and themes you are using when you share the screenshots of your desktop in various Linux communities.
Neofetch is available in the official repo of all major Linux distributions. To install it in Ubuntu and Debian-based distros, use:
sudo apt install neofetchFedora and Red Hat users can use the DNF package manager:
sudo dnf install neofetchArch and Manjaro users can use the pacman command:
sudo pacman -S neofetchopenSUSE users can use the Zypper command:
sudo zypper install neofetchOnce you have it installed, let’s see how to use it.
Using Neofetch
In its simplest form, enter the neofetch command in the terminal:
neofetchAnd it will show you the default output that consists of the ASCII logo of your distribution and some system information.
neofetch --ascii_distro distroname
You know what! You can even display ASCII logo of Windows in Neofetch.
neofetch --ascii_distro _small
You can make it permanent by editing the respective line on the config file.
If a distro logo doesn’t have a small version, it displays the bigger one. And if you made a typo, it shows the Tux logo.
Vim or Nano or your favorite editor using:
nano .config/neofetch/config.confneofetch --off
neofetch -L
neofetch --jp2a /path/to/image
Another type of output that is supported is the caca backend. On the terminal, enter:
neofetch --caca /path/to/imagesudo apt install lolcat
Once lolcat is installed, pipe neofetch to lolcat to get a rainbow effect:
neofetch | lolcatneofetch --ascii "$(fortune | cowsay -W 30)" | lolcat
Cowsay program can also display other animal figures by specifying the cowfile with -f flag.
neofetch --ascii "$(fortune | cowsay -f dragon -W 30)" | lolcat -ats 60
8. Animate it
Speaking of animation, you can animate the entire Neofetch output with the pv command. It consumes a lot of time but if you are doing a screencast and want to amuse people, this could do the trick.
With pv command installed on your system, use it in conjugation with Neofetch:
neofetch | pv -qL 100This will begin typing character by character the neofetch art and info. Adjust the animation speed by changing the value from 100. Higher the value, faster is the animation.
9. Custom colors for the title, underline and info panel
You can change the colors for the informational part. The parts of the informational panel are in the order: title, @, underline, subtitle, colon, info.
You can give a different part to each one of them by adding a color code in their position like this:
neofetch --colors 3 4 5 6 2 1Wrapping Up
There are many more ways to tweak Neofetch. You can always look into its man page.
As I said earlier, for most users Neoetch is just a simple, no-option command to pretty display system information and distribution logo in the terminal.
Even I never bothered to look into customizing Neofetch. It was my teammate Sreenath who likes experimenting with these things and he came up with the idea and I had a feeling that It’s FOSS readers like you might find it amusing.
Over to you now. Did you find some surprising new usage of Neofetch? Do you know some other cool trick? Share it with us in the comments.