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Meme terminal

2025 · zsh, afplay · live

My terminal, but with meme sounds. Every git push hits different when there's a dramatic sting behind it. Inspired by that viral video of someone adding the fahh sound to terminal errors, I took it too far.

meme-terminal landing page — pixel-art wordmark on a dark background with install, listen, and github buttons
What it is

A zsh plugin that plays meme sounds on commands. Git push gets the dramatic dun dun dunnnn. Git pull gets the Among Us role reveal: what did your team do? npm install gets the Dexter "ooh" while you wait. Docker build gets sad violin, because you know it's gonna be a while. Any error, or any typo'd command: fahh.

Nine sounds ship with it. Clone, run the installer, restart your terminal. That's the whole setup.

How it works

Two zsh hooks. That's it. preexec fires when you hit enter: it matches the command against the sound map and plays the matching mp3. precmd fires when the command finishes: non-zero exit code means error sound. A command_not_found_handler catches the fat-fingered commands.

Everything is configurable from one file: swap which sound plays for which command, drop your own mp3s into the sounds folder, add per-command success and failure sounds, set the volume. macOS plays through afplay out of the box; Linux works via paplay or sox.

Why

No reason it should exist, which is exactly why it does. It's the project I point people to when they ask what "build for fun" means: small enough to read in one sitting, dumb enough to make you grin every time you push.