Encounter wild Pokémon in your terminal!

A few days ago, I posted an image that showcased an ASCII art representation of a Raichu from the Alola region. This image appeared after logging into my server using SSH. Surprisingly, it sparked curiosity, and I received several inquiries about the magic behind it.

Let’s delve into the details.

If you haven’t heard about pkmn.li, you should definitely have a look. pkmn.li is a website that shows random ASCII art of Pokémon each time you open the website. glow, the author of the project, provides a lot of interesting details about it on their website.

Since the output provided by the website contains all the necessary ANSI sequences for coloring, and assuming that your terminal supports true color (which it probably does), you aren’t limited to a web browser.

Instead, you can fetch the website with curl and view the sprites right in your terminal.

All I had to do was add the command curl https://pkmn.li to the .bash_profile file of my shell account. Since the contents of the .bash_profile file (or .bashrc on some systems) are executed each time a shell session is opened, you’ll get a random Pokémon encounter each time you open your terminal or launch an SSH session.

However, this only works for Bash, so if you are using a different shell on your system, you’ll have to find the matching “autostart” file.

Gotta catch ’em all!

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