A Fun Christmas Tree for the Bash Command Line

Happy holidays with no GUI required!

While not everyone celebrates Christmas, everyone can still appreciate a beautifully decorated tree, especially if there are presents underneath. If you don’t have enough space for a real tree, you can always put one up in your terminal window, thanks to a clever bash script from Sergio Lepore. Even Windows users can get in on the act thanks to things like WSL and Cygwin.

It also is a fun little script if you’d like to try your hand at customizing a bash script. Let’s just set it up first and worry about customizing later, if you are interested.

User Space

The Christmas tree script is on GitHub. While there are lots of ways to get it, if you just want to use the script, the easiest thing to do is download it as a zip file. Go to the GitHub page.

You’ll see a green button marked “Code”:

The green button is near the top of the page and to the right

Click the Code button and select Download ZIP. I am going to assume you know how to unpack a ZIP file. The file you want — unless you want Spanish — is tree-EN.sh. You don’t really need any of the rest which are really things for GitHub or those…