How to Show an ASCII Art Welcome Screen at the Top of the Vim Terminal
If you use vim, you’re probably just like me. You spend way too much time customising your config files to optimize your keyboard shortcuts and make things look pretty. If you’re new to vim or have yet to customise your config files, I apologise. By the time you’ve read this post, you’ll have a new addiction.
Today we are going to make a nice startup page for your vim (or neovim) setup. Each time you open vim, you’ll get a new random inspirational quote spoken by a random ascii art character.
If you’re unfamiliar with vim, it’s a simple command-line text editor pre-installed on pretty much every Linux or mac machine, runnable with the command: vim. If you’re on windows, you’ll be able to use it with Windows Subsystem for Linux in the exact same way as I do in this post. You may also follow along after setting vim up with a non-Windows Subsystem for Linux Windows guide here. Much of the vim community (including me) has shifted to neovim, a fork with a bunch of new features, so I’ll be providing instructions for both here.
To achieve what we want, we need to customize a plugin called vim-startify — the fancy start screen for vim. But first, we need to install it!
