Turn Your Terminal into a Pokémon Playground with Pokemon-Terminal

Even if you don’t play games often, you probably know the yellow electric mouse Pokémon, Pikachu. This article introduces Pokemon-Terminal , a project that can show up to 719 different Pokémon as terminal or desktop backgrounds.

The tool supports iTerm2, ConEmu, Terminology, Windows Terminal, and Tilix, and works on Windows, macOS, GNOME, Openbox, i3wm, and other platforms. It requires Python 3.7 or higher.

Installation options include:

Arch Linux User Repository package (system‑wide)

pip (system‑wide or per‑user)

npm (per‑user only)

Distutils (system‑wide or per‑user)

After installing, you can use the command line to set a Pokémon as the background. For example, running pokemon ivysaur changes the background to the Pokémon “Ivysaur”. The tool provides many filters such as name, region, lightness, darkness, type, and options for slideshows, wallpaper mode, and verbose output.

usage: pokemon [-h] [-n NAME] [-r [{kanto,johto,hoenn,sinnoh,unova,kalos} ...]]
               [-l [0.xx]] [-d [0.xx]]
               [-t [{normal,fire,fighting,water,flying,grass,poison,electric,ground,psychic,rock,ice,bug,dragon,ghost,dark,steel,fairy} ...]]
               [-ne] [-e] [-ss [X]] [-w] [-v] [-dr] [-c]
               [id]

Set a pokemon to the current terminal background or wallpaper

positional arguments:
  id                Specify the wanted pokemon ID or name (case‑insensitive)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  -c, --clear       Clears the current pokemon from terminal background and quits.
  -n NAME, --name NAME
                    Filter by pokemon name containing NAME
  -r REGION, --region REGION
                    Filter the pokemons by region
  -l [0.xx], --light [0.xx]
                    Filter out pokemons darker than the threshold (default 0.7)
  -d [0.xx], --dark [0.xx]
                    Filter out pokemons lighter than the threshold (default 0.42)
  -t TYPE, --type TYPE
                    Filter the pokemons by type
  -ne, --no-extras  Excludes extra pokemons (from the extras folder)
  -e, --extras      Excludes all non‑extra pokemons
  -ss [X], --slideshow [X]
                    Start a slideshow with X‑minute delay between pokemons
  -w, --wallpaper   Change the desktop wallpaper instead of the terminal background
  -v, --verbose     Enable verbose output
  -dr, --dry-run    Show what would happen without changing wallpaper or background

For Windows Terminal, set the background opacity to 0.5 and enable acrylic by adding the following JSON settings:

"backgroundImageOpacity": 0.5,
"useAcrylic": true,
"acrylicOpacity": 0.0

With the appropriate terminal and font settings (e.g., black font on a transparent window), you can enjoy a personalized Pokémon‑themed development environment.