Prompt

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Revision as of 11:46, 12 May 2010 by Nemo (Talk | contribs)

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As a commandline junkie, my prompt is important. It is a key element to my interface.

It needs to be both informative and terse (I can't stand 2line prompts for eg)

I have used ZSH as my shell of preference since roughly the turn of the century. (previously: bash). Part of the incentive to switch was the prompt interface features found in zsh that were not in bash at the time. (my memory has right-aligned-prompt as notable, but I'm sure there were more reasons than just that ;)

The prompt I use dates it's heritage back to an old dos (specifically: 4DOS) prompt that I setup in... 1994, for a guess.

Features

currently implemented

(thumbnail)
prompt action
  • 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 (deliminating colon changes from host colour to directory colour)
    • 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

under consideration / TODO

these have been suggested, but not yet implemented. Or maybe I wont implement them - but I haven't decided yet


ignored / NOT be implemented

note: some of these were clearly suggested in jest :)


Configuration

here is my prompt config

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.

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