Pyfetch
For those who dont know, Neofetch is command-line system information tool written in bash. Its been one of my most used cli tools when working on new systems. Could I just cat out the /etc/os-release file, sure, but do I want a cool and colorful way of doing that, YES! Since the pandemic I have been exposed to a lot more python code being in Lamda functions, used for terraform deployments into AWS EC2 instances, or used for AMI provisioning. I have an understanding of python and its features/functionality and have been able to make some updates to existing python scripts, but I don’t have any python projects that I have ever really written from scratch, or for my own personal use. Back in the day, circa 2011 or so I would test and learn about different hacking tools from Kitploit but again, never had written my own script and had to follow PEP-8 standards against my own code. So with this project, I decided I should start writing out tools of my own in python that I can manage and take some ownership of. I chose to rewrite Neofetch in Python.
I figured it would be simple and an easy thing to write in a weeks time and who else would want to do that since its already written so well in Bash… I WAS WRONG. If you click this link there is a pretty large list of other people thinking “Hey, I want to rewrite Neofetch in Python and call it Pyfetch”
Seeing this did not deter me though. This is intended to show my understanding of writing a python script and sharing it. If I have the time my goal is to publish it to pypi and allow a pip install to be possible, but as of writing this, Im not sure what is to come.
My intentions are to come up with a way of getting the same system information in a simple fashion like bash does but from what I can see after reading a few other Pyfetch repo’s is that gathering cpu and gpu information may require choosing a python module of choice. I should be able to gather most of the information using the builtin ‘os’ module and keep the project as simple as Bash.
Most of the projects I found on github do their own little magic and have an interesting way of showing the logo on the left. I may go with a different approach like this example below.
I haven’t found a great way to print different emoji’s in cli with python other than the unicode way but I plan on finding a different solution for displaying a logo for the OS being used. Neofetch currently has 11k lines of code to it, which I think has to do with the get_distro_ascii() function starting on line 5524 and ending at line 11540. Updates coming later this week. I may change the name to something else, but I like the idea of adding a new pyfetch repo to github lol. Stay tuned.