lazyvim-lolcrab 💤 🦀

Add some color and excitement to your Neovim dashboard/startup screen! If you’ve come across any examples of full color, Neovim dashboard screens (a.k.a. ASCII art headers), and had any trouble figuring out how to accomplish that, this should help! My goal was to add the full color effects to the header art, but retain the center and footer from the standard Lazyvim installation. You can make additional changes to those sections if you prefer.

I’ve also included a few examples of Neovim ASCII art, including the classic version by @sunjon. You can also make your own from scratch, or use an online ASCII art generator.

Note: This does add some overhead to your Neovim startup, but I think it’s worth it :)

Prerequisites:

1. A recent version of Lazyvim with the default dashboard enabled
2. lolcrab, lolcat, or something similar
3. A text file with your ASCII art

Quick start:

1. Install lolcrab
2. Copy the nvim/lua/plugins repo files into your nvim/lua/plugins folder
3. Quit and restart Neovim

More detailed configuration instructions:

1. Install lolcrab
2. Copy dashboard-nvim.lua into your nvim/lua/plugins folder
3. Copy any of the included ASCII art .txt files to your desired location
4. Open dashboard-nvim.lua and set the following values:
   • lolcrab_command (for example “lolcrab” or “lolcat” or whatever executable you were using to process your ASCII art file)
   • lolcrab_args - check the docs for your executable of choice to pick the arguments you want to use. By default, it is set to "-g warm -s 0.01"
   • header_ascii_file_path - I chose to place the ASCII files in my nvim/lua/plugins folder, and this repo includes a few to get you started. Place your file(s) anywhere you want, and hardcode a direct path if you prefer
5. Optional:
   • Change the theme to “hyper” instead of “doom”
   • Modify the center section to your liking
   • Modify the footer section to your liking
6. Save your changes
7. Quit Neovim
8. Reopen Neovim and enjoy the beauty of your new creation!

Troubleshooting

If you don't see what you expect to see, but instead see the detault Lazyvim screen with the additional "Uh oh...could not render header using lolcrab :(" message, then either lolcrab is missing or the ASCII file is unreadable.

Create your own ASCII art

Here are just a couple of tools you can use:

• https://patorjk.com/software/taag/
• https://github.com/kimusan/pic2ascii

Screenshots

Note that the results are seeded on each run, so even if you use the same args your results will differ:

lolcrab -s 0.01 -g cividis dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g cool dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g cubehelix dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g fruits dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g inferno dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g lolcat dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g magma dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g plasma dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g rainbox dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g rd-yl-gn dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g sinebow dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g spectral dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g turbo dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g viridis dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g warm dashboard-neovim-1.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g warm dashboard-neovim-0.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g warm dashboard-neovim-2.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g warm dashboard-neovim-3.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g warm dashboard-neovim-4.txt lolcrab -s 0.01 -g warm dashboard-neovim-5.txt

Acknowledgements, etc.

• https://github.com/LazyVim/LazyVim
• https://github.com/nvimdev/dashboard-nvim
• https://www.lazyvim.org/extras/ui/dashboard-nvim
• https://github.com/mazznoer/lolcrab
• https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat
• Thanks to @sunjon for the most amazing NeoVim ASCII art!
• Thanks to @glepnir and @hexcowboy for providing a starting point!

Contributing:

If you have any suggestions or improvements, please open a pull request with as much detail as possible.