Customize Windows 💻🖌️✨

Looking to add a personal touch to your Windows 11 machine?

This repository contains a compilation of various tools and scripts that I found out about about to customize the Windows experience.

• Customize Windows 💻🖌️✨
  • Startup Text in Windows Terminal 💬
    • Prerequisites
    • Usage
  • Useful PS1 Scripts
    • GitHub Repository Downloader and Extractor
      • Description
      • Usage
      • Parameters
      • Examples
    • Quotes from goodreads on terminal startup
      • Description
      • Prerequisites
      • Usage

You'll need Powershell to execute ps1 scripts

Startup Text in Windows Terminal 💬

Get awesome ascii art when you start up the terminal

Prerequisites

Before you dive into the world of Windows customization, there are a few prerequisites that you'll need to have in place

To get started, you'll need to have Node.js installed on your machine. You can download it from the official website here. You'll also need to install figlet-cli globally by running the following command:

npm install -g figlet-cli

Finally, to make things much easier, we highly recommend that you download the Windows Terminal app from the Microsoft Store here.

Usage

We can edit the PowerShell profile at $profile to run some startup commands

1. Make the scripts in terminal-startup available globally:

   • Copy the scripts to some folder

   • Add this folder path to the path system variables

   • Check if it's working by typing the following commands in the terminal

     Write-FormattedText -help
     
     Write-Figlet -help

2. If you use windows terminal:

   • Create a new folder for scripts somewhere and create a new file with its name ending with ps1.
   • You can use the commands Write-Figlet and Write-FormattedText to generate the text you need. An example profile script is given here
   • Now, link this ps1 file to a profile in the terminal by editing the Command Line option in the profile settings: powershell.exe -noprofile -noexit -command "invoke-expression '. ''<Path To The PS1 File>''' "

Useful PS1 Scripts

GitHub Repository Downloader and Extractor

Description

This PowerShell script allows you to download a GitHub repository as a zipball archive and extract it to a specified destination folder while excluding specific files and folders.

Usage

.\Get-Repo.ps1 -githubRepoURL "<GitHubRepoURL>" -branch "<BranchName>" -toExclude @("<FileOrFolder1>", "<FileOrFolder2>") -destinationFolder "<DestinationFolder>"

Parameters

• githubRepoURL

The URL of the GitHub repository to download. It should be in the format https://github.com/owner/repository.

• branch

The name of the branch to download from the GitHub repository.

• toExclude

An array of file/folder names to exclude from the extracted content.

• destinationFolder

The folder where the repository will be extracted.

Examples

# Example 1: Download and extract a GitHub repository, excluding specific files and folders
.\Get-Repo.ps1 -githubRepoURL "https://github.com/example/repo" -branch "main" -toExclude @("config.ini", "docs") -destinationFolder "C:\Projects\MyRepo"

# Example 2: Download and extract another GitHub repository
.\Get-Repo.ps1 -githubRepoURL "https://github.com/chakri68/webpack-babel-template" -branch "with-typescript" -destinationFolder "./webpack-template"

Quotes from goodreads on terminal startup

Description

This PowerShell script allows you to get a random quote from goodreads and display it on terminal startup.

Prerequisites

This script required a json file with quotes

The schema for the json file is as follows:

type JSONFile = Quote[];

type Quote = {
  text: string;
  author: string;
};

We can use a python script that runs every few days to get the quotes from goodreads and store them in a json file. We can use Task Scheduler to run the script every few days.

You can find the example python script I use here

Usage

You can run the script by passing the path to the json file as a parameter

Display-Quote -quotesFilePath "<Path to the json file>"