Generate ALL THE COWS.

A plugin for Fish Shell that picks a random cow with cowsay or cowthink, including random facial expressions and eyes.

• fish, version 3.5.1 or higher
  • Older versions of fish may work, but will not be tested.
• cowsay, version 3.0 or higher
  • The version installed by your package manager should work, but the latest release from this fork is recommended.
• Perl 5
  • Perl is already a dependency for cowsay, but it's also explicitly mentioned here for clarity, since perl is also directly used in some functions.

Install with Fisher (recommended):

fisher install ProspectPyxis/omnicow.fish

Install with oh my fish:

omf install ProspectPyxis/omnicow.fish

Simply call omnicow like you would cowsay or cowthink. All flags that work wish cowsay will also work with omnicow.

The base omnicow command accepts additional flags over cowsay:

• --say/--think - Forces omnicow to use only cowsay or cowthink rather than randomizing between the two, respectively. These flags are mutually exclusive.
• --default-eyes/-E - do not randomize the cow's eyes.
• --max-height/--max-lines - The maximum amount of lines a selected cowfile can have. This does not include the speech bubble's height.
• --max-width/--max-cols - The maximum width a selected cowfile can have. This does not include the speech bubble's width.
• --no-exclude/-a - By default, omnicow will respect the variable omnicow_exclude_cowfiles for cowfiles to not use (see Settings/Omnicow database file). Set this flag to ignore the variable.

There is also a subcommand, omnicow db, that manages the omnicow database file. For information on how to use this subcommand, run omnicow db --help.

omnicow will generate and read from a database for valid cows, and their widths and heights (see How it works below). By default, this file is at $XDG_DATA_HOME/cows/omnicowdb.csv ($XDG_DATA_HOME defaults to ~/.local/share if not set). If you wish to store the omnicow database somewhere else or with another filename, you can set the variables omnicow_db_path for its location, and omnicow_db_filename for its filename.

# Just store the omnicow database in my home directory
set omnicow_db_path $HOME
# Make the database file hidden by adding a leading dot
set omnicow_db_filename '.omnicowdb.csv'

If there are certain cowfiles you would like for omnicow to not pick from, you can set the omnicow_exclude_cowfiles variable.

This variable is empty by default.

# I don't want a three-eyed cow or a sheep!
set omnicow_exclude_cowfiles three-eyes sheep

On the first run, omnicow will generate the file $XDG_DATA_HOME/cows/omnicowdb.csv to use as a database for all cowfiles it can find ($XDG_DATA_HOME defaults to ~/.local/share); this is for omnicow to be able to quickly read the widths and heights of cowfiles. All subsequent runs of omnicow will read and write from this file. You can also manually set the location and filename of the database file by setting the variables omnicow_db_path and omnicow_db_filename, respectively (see Settings/Omnicow database file).

omnicow respects the COWPATH variable as to where it sources cowfiles from; however, unlike the base cowsay command, this variable does not need to be exported. If COWPATH is unset, omnicow will read from /usr/share/cows.

On subsequent runs, omnicow will check if any cowfiles have been added or removed, and regenerate the database file if necessary. Note that it does not check for changed files - if you edited a cowfile and wish to regenerate the database, you must run omnicow db generate --force by yourself.

The database is always in comma-separated values format; however, instead of parsing the file on your own, it's likely easier to use the omnicow db get subcommand to get values from the file.

The following features are planned for the future:

• More robust randomized faces - random tongue, add a tongue when using "XX" or "**" eyes, etc.
• More configuration on possible eye types
• A whitelist of allowed cowfiles.

Any pull requests, issues, or feature requests are welcome!

This project is licensed under the MIT License.