tiny-care-terminal

This is a little dashboard that tries to take care of you when you're using your terminal. It tells you cute, self care things, and tries not to stress you out. It shows:

• the last tweets from @tinycarebot, @selfcare_bot and @magicrealismbot. The first two tend to tweet reminders about taking breaks, drinking water and looking outside, and the latter tells you strange, whimsical stories. If you don't like these bots, they're configurable!
• your git commits from today and the last 7 days. When I get stressed out because I think I haven't done anything, it turns out that I only think about big and serious commits, and forget about all the tiny amounts of work I've actually done throughout. Hopefully this will help you too <3
• the weather, because you might get rained on.

It looks like this, and updates every 20 minutes.

Make it go

1. Do the npm dance

npm install -g tiny-care-terminal
npm install -g git-standup

(Note: this currently doesn't work with yarn because of path shenanigans I wrote, so while I'm fixing that, pls use npm 🙏)

2. Setting the environment variables

After installing the npm package, you need to set up the configuration in your Terminal.

Every OS and shell is different so I probably won't hit all of them, but the bottom line is that you should copy those environment variables wherever the rest of your system's variables live. For example,

• if you're using zsh, that's probably in your home directory's .zshrc file
• if you're using bash, that could be your bash_profile file
• if you're using fish, use set -gx key value in your ~/.config/fish/config.fish file

Note that the export bit is pretty key, to make sure that they are globally available. To check that the variables have been set correctly, you can print them in the terminal -- for example, echo $TTC_WEATHER.

Configure the dashboard

All the settings the dashboard looks at are in the sample file sample.env. This file isn't used by the dashboard, it just lists the environment variables that you can copy in your rc files:

• TTC_BOTS are the 3 twitter bots to check, comma separated. The first entry in this list will be displayed in the big party parrot box.
• TTC_SAY_BOX = parrot | bunny | llama | cat, to party with a different parrot (or, more specifically: to have a different animal say a message in the big box)
• TTC_REPOS, a comma separated list of repos to look at for git commits. This is using git-standup under the hood, and looks one subdirectory deep (so if you have all your code directories in a ~/Code, you only need to list that one)
• TTC_REPOS_DEPTH is the max directory-depth to look for git repositories in the directories defined with TTC_REPOS (by default 1). Note that the deeper the directory depth, the slower the results will be fetched.
• TTC_WEATHER, the location to check the weather for. A zipcode doesn't always work, so if you can, use a location first (so prefer Paris over 90210)
• TTC_CELSIUS (by default true)
• TTC_APIKEYS -- set this to false if you don't want to use Twitter API keys and want to scrape the tweets instead.
• TTC_UPDATE_INTERVAL, set this to change the update frequency in minutes, default is 20 minutes.

Set up Twitter API keys

The dashboard has two alternatives for reading tweets: using your API keys or scraping. API keys is preferred (because lol scraping), but if you're really not into that, then skip the next section and read the bit about setting TTC_APIKEYS

You need Twitter API keys for the tweets to work. It should be pretty easy to create a new app, and get these 4 values. After you've set them up, set these env variables (see the sample.env for an example):

TTC_CONSUMER_KEY='...'
TTC_CONSUMER_SECRET='...'
TTC_ACCESS_TOKEN='...'
TTC_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET='...'

3. Start!

tiny-care-terminal

You can exit the dashboard by pressing esc or q. You can refresh it manually by pressing r.

🆘 Halp I don't see my commits

There's a couple of reasons why this might happen:

• did you run npm install -g git-standup after installing tiny-care-terminal? If you didn't, that's the most likely culprit
• did you forget to export your TTC_REPOS environment variable? Open a new tab, and type echo $TTC_REPOS to make sure it's not empty. Note that spaces inside the repo names are not supported right now :(
• are you on Windows? Not super sure it works on Windows because of the bash scripts, but working on it
• did you use yarn? I know yarn is cool, and I've seen it work with this, but can you double check that it still doesn't work with a basic npm installation instead?

Take care of yourself, ok? 💖