Enhance Your Terminal Display with Fastfetch

Polished

© Lead Image © Kirillm, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © Kirillm, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 304/2026
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Almost all Linux graphical desktop environments integrate programs that provide users with system information. Fastfetch lets you route important system information to the terminal.

Every desktop environment has a terminal. In addition, a large number of consoles under independent development are available for various graphical user interfaces. What they all have in common is their almost identical look, which typically just displays the hostname, the currently logged-in user, and a prompt. Fastfetch [1] lets you add system information to the terminal, enhancing the look as well as the feature scope.

Fastfetch takes a similar approach to Neofetch [2], which is no longer actively maintained. When called, Fastfetch collects defined system information and displays it at the prompt in a terminal. It offers granular configuration options (e.g., you can add a wallpaper to brighten up the appearance). Besides visual effects, Fastfetch also lets you change the details of how system information is displayed. In addition to providing basic information (e.g., CPU, RAM size, and kernel version), Fastfetch can also show you GPU-specific information relating to the installed software. On top of all that, Fastfetch impresses with its speed. In contrast to Neofetch, essentially a Bash script comprising more than 11,000 lines, Fastfetch, written primarily in C, runs far faster.

The Fastfetch developers offer a huge number of binary packages on the application's GitHub page [3]. Besides the numerous binary packages for individual Linux package managers (available for various hardware architectures), you can also grab several packages for different BSD derivatives. There are also a handful of binary packages and data archives for a couple of non-Unix proprietary operating systems. Fastfetch has already made its way into the software repositories of a number of popular Linux distributions, although the versions are often outdated. Because Fastfetch is still under active development, it makes sense to retrieve it from the GitHub page.

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