Prompt

my personal (zsh) prompt setups has, on one line

• last job exit status (invisible when zero)
• host:path in network friendly (ish) format
• path shortening to last three components, plus subtle visual indication when this occurs
  • this shortening balances path context needs with space limitations. and is why the preceeding 'network friendly' format is "ish" :)
• path colourisation to indicate whether $PWD is RW or not (not usually means RO, but may also mean 'directory does not exist')
• count of background jobs (invisible if zero)
• ^ and $ reminder mnemonic for regex start/end line matching (I have a dyslexia about this!)
• live time and load average (load gets dynamic colourisation also, but is invisible below threshold (set to 0.3 for me)
  • for values of "live" that = "20 second refresh"
  • this refresh ensures that an abandoned prompt will keep-alive a remote shell over dodgy NAT :)
• current tty

ideas I don't currently implement

• per-host auto-colourisation
  • http://screwtape.jottit.com/per-host_prompt_colouring
• vcs_info (I would probably replace tty info with this, with a colourisation to help the glancing eye notice)
  • http://ft.bewatermyfriend.org/comp/zsh/functions/prompt_ft_setup.html
    • example of vcs_info

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here is my prompt:

http://wiki.thorx.net/~nemo/s/zsh_ps1.txt

warning: it's full of comments and code cruft, both from old revisions, and also future plans.