Colours and art styles

How the art is drawn, the gradient and accent colours, and following your desktop theme.

Art styles#

style (or --style) picks how the animation is drawn into character cells:

Style	How it draws	Good for
`half` (default)	Two vertical samples per cell, with half blocks (▀▄█). Solid glyphs only, so edges are crisp and small holes stay holes.	Most animations.
`quad`	Four samples per cell in a 2x2 grid (▘▝▖▗▚▞…). Twice the resolution of `half` in both directions.	Art with fine detail.
`ramp`	One sample per cell, mapped onto the characters in `ramp` by density.	A classic ASCII look.
`raw`	The art's own characters, exactly as authored.	Hand-drawn and pre-coloured ASCII, such as `earth`.

half and quad render as solid blocks and rescale to any terminal. ramp uses ramp, lowest coverage first:

toml

style = "ramp"
ramp  = " .:-=+*#%@"      # a classic ASCII ramp
# ramp = " █"             # hard edges

The shaded blocks of the default ramp are stipple patterns in most fonts, which can read as noise along edges; a plain ASCII ramp is cleaner.

raw prints the art's own characters untouched. Frames may carry their own truecolor escapes, and art_color picks between them and the theme gradient:

`art_color`	Meaning
`"own"` (default)	Show the art's real embedded colours.
`"theme"`	Ignore them and paint the art with the gradient, like escape-free art.

When it has to shrink, raw keeps thin strokes by picking an inked cell from each block rather than a blind fixed sample.

Size#

The art scales to fit inside width by height cells (56 by 20 by default), keeping its aspect ratio. It is never enlarged beyond its authored size: more room gives chunkier blocks, not more detail. Set either to 0 to fill the space.

animfetch --width 40 --height 12

Both caps matter: a wide, short animation slips under a height cap alone.

Colours#

toml

# Vertical colour ramp down the art. An empty list leaves the art uncoloured.
gradient = ["#f5c95c", "#f17f5b", "#f45c82", "#b07cf4", "#74a4ff"]

# Animate the gradient so it crawls through the art.
gradient_scroll = false

accent = "#74a4ff"     # user@host, the rule, and labels
value  = "#c8ccd4"     # values

gradient_scroll is off by default: a gradient that crawls through the art draws the eye away from the terminal, which is the thing you are meant to be looking at.

--no-color (or gray = true) draws everything in shades of grey: every colour keeps its brightness and loses its hue, so the art and the text stay readable and the palette swatches are left out. --def-color puts the default colours back. color = false (or NO_COLOR) sends no colour codes at all, which leaves your terminal's own colours.

Following your desktop theme#

Set color_source = "palette" and the fetch follows your desktop theme, reading a matugen, pywal or wallust palette. Anything the file does not define keeps the value you wrote, so a palette can only add colour, never remove it.

toml

color_source = "palette"

Try it without editing anything:

animfetch --once --palette

animfetch looks for the first of these files that exists:

toml

palette_files = [
  "~/.local/state/quickshell/user/generated/colors.json",  # matugen
  "~/.cache/wal/colors.json",                              # pywal
  "~/.cache/wallust/colors.json",                          # wallust
]

and reads these names out of it. The defaults are Material You role names, as written by matugen:

toml

palette_accent   = "primary"
palette_value    = "on_surface"
palette_gradient = ["primary", "secondary", "tertiary"]

pywal and wallust name their colours color0..color15 instead, so with those you want something like:

toml

palette_accent   = "color4"
palette_value    = "color7"
palette_gradient = ["color4", "color5", "color6"]

Under --pin the palette file is re-read when it changes, so retheming your desktop recolours the running animation without restarting it.