(๑•ᴗ•)⊃━~━☆ﾟcd ∆
(๑•ᴗ•)⊃━~/∆━☆ﾟ

There was a recent thread on this a few months ago, if you want to see some more answers.

What does your shell prompt look like?

I’ve started using Starship and I’m pretty happy with last few weeks.

https://github.com/starship/starship

My shell prompt is quite involved, but I’m using fish, so I’m not gonna paste the whole code here.

But I’d like to share one change in approach, that I found a game changer:

Make it two lines.

The more stuff you put into your prompt, the longer it gets, so what I do is that I have one line with the path, git info etc and the second line just starts with ➤ . So my actual prompt is always on the very left, no matter how long the path. Which also means I don’t have to shorten the path or other things I’ve seen people do.

For example right now, it looks like this:

~/Work/secret-project on master|→25!11?1
[2] ➤

The git status on the top right means: 25 files staged, 11 changed, 1 untracked. The [2] is the return code of the last execution.

Of course there’s lots of colors. :)

Mine is quite simple too. It includes my username, hostname, [env] (when in guix environment), and a fish-like shortened form of the current working directory.

So, for instance, when in ~/src/git/guix, the prompt looks like this:

bandali@jirud ~/s/g/guix> 

And when in a guix environment, like so:

bandali@jirud [env] ~/s/g/guix> 

The relevant bits from my bashrc:

b_prompt() {
    cwd=$(sed -e "s:$HOME:~:" -e "s:\(\.\?[^/]\)[^/]*/:\1/:g" <<<$PWD)
    printf $cwd
}

if [ -n "$GUIX_ENVIRONMENT" ]
then
    PS1="\u@\h [env] \$(b_prompt)> "
else
    PS1="\u@\h \$(b_prompt)> "
fi

This is the prompt I have been using for years (I am using Fish):

function fish_prompt
    if [ $PWD = $HOME ]
        set directory '~'
    else
        set directory (basename $PWD)
    end

    set_color $fish_color_cwd
    echo -n $directory
    set_color normal
    echo -n " \$ "
end

It looks like this in my home directory:

~ $

And like this in another directory:

Downloads $

I use zsh

PS1='%n@%m %2d%% '

RPROMPT="%* %W"

I don’t update my environment very much; I’ve taken my basic UI (Window Maker, zsh, xterm, Emacs, a few other things) with me across multiple Linux distros. It’s old enough that I’m pretty sure it predates emoji support in widely-available terminal fonts, for example.

I never liked shell prompts of varying lengths. Mine are always two lines, where the second is short, and I find this much nicer to read, because I only care about the information in the prompt some of the time.

dan@eddie pts/3 [~]
» screen
dan@eddie-screen pts/5 [~]
» cd dotfiles
dan@eddie-screen pts/5 ±1[m][master] [~/dotfiles]
» exit
dan@eddie pts/3 [~]
» 

my dotfiles

The :)/:( exit status is much appreciated, very cute.

-bash-5.0$

On some systems, it’s just \$ , but typically: \u@\h \W \$

IKMPS (I keep my prompt simple):

(gustaf@vps)-(17:31:05)-(~/tmp)
(jobs:1) $ echo $PS1
(\u@\h)-(\t)-(\w)\n(jobs:\j) $

(vps is not a real hostname, I’ve actually hardcoded it to a string to avoid DO’s default hostname).

I use pure, a ZSH prompt. It tells me information about the git repository I’m in, too.

For example:

❯ ~
❯ ~ cd Development/streisand
❯ streisand master*

While I haven’t yet gotten around to implementing the same features in my rash prompt, in Zsh I have a somewhat unique prompt.

The most unique feature is path coloring based on ownership and permissions. In general my philosophy on prompts is that I want all info displayed that may be relevant. To that end, I display git info when in a git repo (branch name with options for coloring the name based on regexp, whether or not there are uncommitted changes or changes in submodules, and the number of commits ahead/behind upstream), I check environment variables and display the hostname when inside ssh or tmux, I check my username and display it if it is not the username I usually use, I display the return code of the previous command if it was not 0, etc.

So far for Rash I’ve really only implemented getting git info (which is frequently the info I care most about), but I plan to add libraries to make a lot more situational info available, with timeouts everywhere so my shell doesn’t lag in big repositories or remote file systems.

My overly detailed prompt is available at https://github.com/gioele/bashrc.d/blob/master/prompt.

A couple of examples:

• Versioned git directory: gioele@host:~/Projects/pw [master * u=]$ (more or less the usual __git_ps1 + colors)
• When logged in via SSH: gioele@remote:/srv/dir (ssh)$ (The ssh part is colored. Different colors for different hosts.)
• When {rb,py,nod}env has been activated gioele@host:~ (ruby 2.6.2)$
• When the previous command did not exit with 0: gioele@host:~ (errcode: 127)$
• Once the prompt gets too long: ($ on its own line)

  gioele@remote:~/Projects/git-collab-guide [macos-screenshots * +3] (ssh)
  $
  

My prompt is still PS1="\$ ". It’s # when I’m root and $ when I’m not. pwd tells me the directory I should know I’m in. All that git stuff, oddly, is accessible under the git command.

at work:

~|⇒

at home:

cadey:cadey@kahless ~ ./rw
$

~ %

I’ve never really been able to find value in the more elaborate prompts, probably because my terminal usage is : open, run command, close. I also don’t ssh around, or do much git stuff from the command line, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Currently

[hostname] basename of pwd $ 

so for example

[bulbul] etc $ 

It used to be just the hostname, but since I’ve been working more with remote servers, I added the hostname too. Recently I’ve been running the wrong commands on the wrong machine, making me consider some colour, calculated by the hash of the hostname or something, but I’m not sure if that will help that much either. Has anyone got any tips on how they handle this issue?

I just use whatever’s configured on what are mostly VPSes. Dotfiles take effort. I’ve gotten used to vanilla vim.

I’m currently using fish and use the following prompt at home:

https://gist.github.com/xnuk/452ae61e077f886471b5

At work my tooling/dot files have gotten out of sync and it looks like I’m using this:

https://github.com/fishpkg/fish-prompt-metro

I’ve been meaning to look at and try out new prompts again. Thanks for starting a new thread.

https://github.com/nhooyr/dotfiles/blob/062e9fe7f6408a8e3d566f7f56db80e4dacd6eba/fish/functions/fish_prompt.fish

Looks like this:

~/src/nhooyr/websocket:wasm-close-read
$

benoncoffee@hostname 》

In bold green text, and the current path in white, on the right.

The prompt itself is just an arrow. Different colors for different hosts.

➤ true                                                            done 22:13:15 [gb master]
➤ false                                                           done 22:13:18 [gb master]
return code 1 at 2019-09-22 22:13:19
➤                                                                 done 22:13:19 [gb master]

Fish has a “right prompt”. It disappears if you type a long command and it reappears if possible.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I never rely on the display of the current git branch. I should remove it.

It’s dynamic, and I use ksh

x220 | /home/ben
$ cd /git/whatever; false
x220 | /git/whatever [ master ] >>> 1 <<<
$

I try to keep my ZSH prompt fairly simple, but context driven.

When I am on my local machine, it looks like this:

~% echo $PS1
%f%1~%(!.%F{red}.%f)%#%f 
~% 

The %1~ part shows only the current dir name or ~ if curdir is $HOME.

When USER is not my normal username :

user@:~% echo $PS1
%F{yellow}%n@%f:%1~%(!.%F{red}.%f)%#%f 

When a non-local host (eg ssh):

somehost:~% echo $PS1
%F{yellow}%m%f:%1~%(!.%F{red}.%f)%#%f 

When USER is not my normal username, AND non local host (ssh) :

user@somehost:~% echo $PS1
%F{yellow}%n@%m%f:%1~%(!.%F{red}.%f)%#%f 

When root, the % turns to #, and the # is red:

root@somehost:~# echo $PS1
%F{yellow}%n@%m%f:%1~%(!.%F{red}.%f)%#%f 

I also have RPS1 set for vcs info:

~% echo $RPS1
${vcs_info_msg_0_}

helpful ref: zsh prompt expansion

Work desktop:

~$ echo "'$PS1'"
'\W\$ '

Work servers:

peach-dev01 ~$ echo "'$PS1'"
'\h \W\$ '

I’m unable to function without __git_ps1. I have a simple hostname:curdir>, with hostname in red and the basename of the current directory (and git info if applicable) in cyan:

\[\e[0;31m\]\h\[\e[0m\]:\[\e[0;36m\]\W$(__git_ps1 "(%s)")\[\e[0m\]>

Without colors that’s

\h:\W$(__git_ps1 "(%s)")>

At work I added a little bash function to tell me how long the last command took if it took more than a second, but it’s not as useful as I expected.

PS1=”$(date +’%R’) $(basename "$(pwd)")$(if [[ "$(id -un)" == "root" ]]; then echo #; else print $; fi) “

<time> <folder>$

it looks like:

20:22 h$

oh-my-zsh default. It has everything I need and I don’t need to think about it.

--
  as unwind on MacBook
  in ~/Dropbox/yyyy-mm-dd/..
  $> fortune
FORTH IF HONK THEN

--

I like the multi-line style, and I’ve got colors, too.

I use the rc shell, and I use a very simple prompt.

;

Then when you copy paste sessions without the output, you can run it again.

In my previous ZSH days, …

I mostly live in bash.

19:16:43 kbjensen@obsidian:~/prog
0 $ 

Here’s the string with the escapes:

PS1+="\[\033[38;5;32m\]\t \[\033[38;5;34m\]\u\[\033[38;5;37m\]@\[\033[38;5;31m\]\h\[\033[38;5;37m\]:\[\033[38;5;32m\]\w\n\[\033[38;5;34m\]\$? \[\033[38;5;37m\]\$ \[\033[0m\]"

Mine is GenericUnixPrompt>.

hostname pwd _

Hostname in white, space, last 3 fragments of PWD in green (~ for $HOME), space, and then an underscore cursor. No nonsense. When I’m in a git repo I tack on some status at the end

hostname pwd (branch) _

Mine is:

19-09-22 20:59:41 0  ~/src/lisp  > ls
^ Date    ^Time   ^$?  ^$PWD
Purple    Yellow  White   yellow 

Root prompt is the same except all white.

export PROMPT="%{$fg_bold[magenta]%}%D%{$reset_color%} %{$fg_bold[yellow]%}%*%{$reset_color%} %? %{$fg_bold[yellow]%} %~ %{$reset_color%} > "
export RPROMPT=

for me it is quite trivial actually (borrowed from gentoo)

` # gentoo prompt is excellent. set that up

prompt_gentoo_setup () {
    prompt_gentoo_prompt=${1:-'blue'}
    prompt_gentoo_user=${2:-'green'}
    prompt_gentoo_root=${3:-'red'}

    if [ "$USER" = 'root' ]
    then
        base_prompt="%B%F{$prompt_gentoo_root}%m%k "
    else
        base_prompt="%B%F{$prompt_gentoo_user}%n@%m%k "
    fi
    post_prompt="%b%f%k"

    path_prompt="%B%F{$prompt_gentoo_prompt}%1~"
    PS1="$base_prompt$path_prompt %# $post_prompt"
    PS2="$base_prompt$path_prompt %_> $post_prompt"
    PS3="$base_prompt$path_prompt ?# $post_prompt"

}

prompt_gentoo_setup “$@” `

λ(florian@parakeet ~) $ meh
zsh: command not found: meh
-127-(florian@parakeet ~) $

• username is yellow on most machines
• hostname is a different color on all my machines
• error code is red.
• zsh, config at https://github.com/winks/dotfiles
• I hate multi-line prompts.

My prompt is based on the old RedHat default prompt:

[user@host:/path/to/pwd]$

At least in some terminals, @ and : are considered word characters, while [] are not, so I can double-click on the prompt to copy my current location to the clipboard, for use with scp or rsync or other tools.

I do have a bit of bash magic to limit the path length to 40 characters, though, since a too-long prompt gets a bit unwieldy.

Most importantly, though, I have my prompt change colour based on the hostname, which has more than once helped me avoid running a command on the wrong host by mistake.

;

export PS1=’$?$ ’

Rationale: typically this amounts to “0$ “, which is nice. The only required information is the status of the last command, which is on the shell variable $?. In the rare cases where I forget in which directory I am, running “pwd” is enough.

PS1="[\W \A] "

Answers the two crucial questions: where and when?

[username@host $CWD]$ 

And its coloured with named colours, so it really looks like this:

PS1="$HC$FWHT[$FBLE\u$FWHT@$FCYN\h $FYEL\W$FWHT]$ $RS"