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Random Zsigs for BarnOwl

Note: There's a lot of background information in here which can be bypassed.

First off, if you haven't already, take a look at BarnOwl's internal documentation. Try the following two commands.

:help
:show quickstart

(Also viewable outside of BarnOwl, in the form of messier-to-read source code, at /help.c - BarnOwl - Trac and the "intro" file at /docs/intro.txt - BarnOwl - Trac,

Intro to Zsigs

A "zsig" appears after your username (your Athena account name) in Zephyr (see Using Zephyr (a.k.a. Zephyr for Dummies) if you don't know what Zephyr is).

By default, if your name is Jane Lillian Doe, your zsig is (Jane L Doe). For instance, if you're on Zephyr, you might see

2013 / personal / jdoe  22:16  (Jane L Doe)
    ...hey I'm talking here.

Most people keep it that way, since people may not immediately know who you are by your username. Some people opt to remove the middle initial or leave it at an interesting quote. To do so, in BarnOwl simply type in

:set zsig  "This is a very interestin' quote."

(BarnOwl accepts either single or double quotes to enclose your zsig, allowing you to use the other type of quote inside your zsig. Experiment, BarnOwl tells you what it interpreted your command as by showing as confirmation

zsig = 'This is a very interestin' quote.'  

Random Zsig Generator

But what if you want to set up a random zsig generator?

Deprecated: BarnOwl now has better built-in support for zsig randomization than it did when this page was written. Rather than reading the rest of this page, you may want to read show variable zsigfunc, and look at random_zephyr_signature.

In outline, we use some bash magic that prints a zsig out to stdout, then set up BarnOwl to run that bit of bash magic. BarnOwl has something already which will automagically take that stdout and pipe it into your zsig.

Steps Outside of BarnOwl: Creating the zsigs file

Connect to Athena if you haven't already.

1. Create a file of zsigs. In this article we'll call the file .zsigs

2. Put zsigs in the file, separated by newlines

   a zsig
   random zsig2
   random234
   

3. If you want to, test the bit of bash magic we'll be using

   kusername@dr-wily:~$ shuf -n1 ~/.zsigs
   random zsig2
   

   The second line should be one of the zsigs from your list. Run it multiple times if you want to check for randomness.

Setting Up BarnOwl: Using the zsigproc variable

Background

Open up BarnOwl now.

kusername@dr-wily:~$ add barnowl; barnowl

Using the command :show variables inside of BarnOwl we see descriptions of the variables of interest to us:

zsig - zephyr signature (default: '')
zsigproc - name of a program to run that will generate zsigs (default: '<null>')     

To get more detailed descriptions we can use, respectively

:show variable zsig
:show variable zsigproc

We will also use the :startup command, which is described in

:help startup

The Steps

1. Use the :startup command in BarnOwl to write to the "~/.owl/startup" file (or wherever you decided to put the your startup settings file for BarnOwl). (Alternatively, edit the "~/.owl/startup" file directly). As mentioned in the detailed documentation, the variable zsig takes precedence over zsigproc. Make sure that zsig is empty. Then set zsigproc to run our bit of bash magic.

   :startup set zsig ''
   :startup set zsigproc 'shuf -n1 ~/.zsigs'
   

2. Force BarnOwl to reload the startup configuration file

   :source "~/.owl/startup"
   

3. Optional: Check that the correct startup file is loaded

   :show startup
   

Now you have random zsigs.