The Dashboard

Every timvim session opens on the alpha dashboard — a start screen built with alpha-nvim. It is the first thing you see and your launchpad into the editor.

The Kartoza banner

The dashboard is headed by a full-colour Kartoza logo rendered directly in the terminal. It is not an image file loaded at runtime: it is a block of pre-computed, highlighted text so it displays instantly and works over SSH.

How the banner is generated

The logo is produced from a PNG using two tools:

• catimg converts the image into 24-bit-colour terminal output.
• term2alpha turns that output into Lua highlight groups plus a header table that alpha-nvim can render.

Both tools are available in the development shell (nix develop).

Regenerating the banner

To refresh or replace the logo, generate the header Lua and paste it into the dashboard config:

catimg -H 30 kartoza-logo.png | term2alpha > header.lua

• -H 30 sets the height in terminal lines — adjust to taste.
• term2alpha only understands the 24-bit colour codes emitted by catimg; other renderers such as chafa produce incompatible ANSI codes.

The generated file contains two parts: a set of vim.api.nvim_set_hl(...) highlight definitions and a header table (val lines plus per-line opts.hl specs). Copy both into config/plugins/alpha.nix, replacing the existing highlight groups and the dashboard.section.header block, then rebuild with nix run.

Full walkthrough

The complete banner-update recipe lives in the project's CLAUDE.md under Updating the Startup Banner.

Common dashboard actions

The dashboard offers single-key shortcuts for the tasks you reach for most:

Key	Action
n	New file
f	Find file (Telescope)
r	Recent files (Telescope)
s	Restore last session
q	Quit

Beyond the shortcuts

Once you are past the dashboard, press Space to open the which-key menu and reach the full command set.