Use terminal commands for displaying a Neovim dashboard logo

When I first started really customising my Neovim config to my own personal preferences, one of the things I did to really make it feel like my own was to add a custom dashboard logo.

I settled on the name iainvim for my config, being based obviously on my first name but also cheekily containing nvim within the name.

My initial logo was shamelessly stolen heavily inspired by Josh Medeski, who used this Text to ASCII Art Generator (built on top of the excellent FIGlet tool) to create ASCII art style logos for many of the config files in his dotfiles.

Here was mine (if you use LazyVim or the snacks.nvim dashboard, this will look familiar):

Back then I used dashboard-nvim and here is what that code looked like:

I later moved to using the snacks.nvim dashboard and used a new logo generated with this Go-based TUI: superstarryeyes/bit

And it looked a bit like this:

Which might have been fine to leave it at that, but I wanted a little something extra.

The bit TUI can be used to generate a bash script that uses ANSI escape sequences to output colour.

[!tip] Here's a good article explaining ANSI escape sequences that has helped me manually add them in other bash scripts: Bash Colors | ShellHacks

The generated script, saved as iainvim_logo and included in the PATH, looks like this:

And ends up producing a logo like this:

![[attachments/coloured-terminal-output-of-iainvim_logo-command.png|coloured terminal output of iainvim_logo command]]

Which can then be used as a terminal section command in the snacks.nvim dashboard like so:

And you get a result like this:

![[attachments/iainsimmons_neovim_dashboard_2025-11-23.png|Neovim dashboard with gradient logo]]