Dotfiles

I feel that dotfiles are pretty personal. Each person is going to have their own preferences, organization, way of doing things, etc., that is significantly different from others'. This makes direct forking of dotfiles unlikely (at least in my mind).

Rather, the benefit of sharing one's dotfiles, and the part that I enjoy, is looking through them and finding those little gems that you really want to play around with or try out. So, what I've done is to try and collect some of the things I think are cool or worthwhile (my little gems =), to make it easier for anyone looking for some cool code. Enjoy!

Cool Features

• GNU Screen hardstatus string:

  The status line looks like this:

  

  And the whole terminal when using it looks like this:

  

  This string creates a cool bottom row scrolling "tab" effect. It highlights the current screen name (in red) and will scroll so that that screen and any surrounding ones are are visible. It also shows the current time and date on the far right which can be nice in a non-gui environment.

  Here's the format string to make this happen:

    "%{Ck}%-w%{=b kR}%50>%n %t%{-}%+w%-15=%{=b kG}|%d/%m/%y %C"
  

• PS1 Prompt:

  

  This is an expanded version of what comes with Ubuntu. It includes virtualenv information, git branch and status information, and command exit code information. However, perhaps the best part is not what it provides, but how it works.

  I designed my PS1 to be easy to extend and improve upon. For one, I use PROMPT_COMMAND so that I can run a function allowing me to more easily collect information and organize my code. Also, I include the terminal colors and brightness as variables so that you can specify the color by name rather than having to know the code. Furthermore, each "feature" of the prompt is setup into a separate variable; at the end, I just concatenate all those variables together to get the prompt. The benefit here is that when I look at the PS1 assignment, I can see what all the parts and their orderings are without worrying about the details of how they work. Then, if I want to inspect how a particular feature works, I can look at it in isolation. For example, When I recently added support for showing the virtualenv I'm working in if there is one, it was easy to add a section for creating a "virtualenv_name" variable and then simply putting that into the PS1 concatenation.

  If you are interested, here is the code at the time of writing:

    # Set the prompt
    set_prompt_vars(){
        ret=$?
  
        # Forground Colors
        black="\[$(tput setaf 0)\]"
        red="\[$(tput setaf 1)\]"
        green="\[$(tput setaf 2)\]"
        yellow="\[$(tput setaf 3)\]"
        blue="\[$(tput setaf 4)\]"
        magenta="\[$(tput setaf 5)\]"
        cyan="\[$(tput setaf 6)\]"
        white="\[$(tput setaf 7)\]"
  
        # Attributes
        bold="\[$(tput bold)\]"
        dim="\[$(tput sgr0)\]"
  
        # Exit will set the return code for $(returncode) to read
        # Without this, returncode will return the status of the line before it
        $(exit $ret)
        local return_code="$dim$red"$(returncode)
        if [ -z "$VIRTUAL_ENV" ]; then
    	local virtualenv_name=""
        else
    	local virtualenv_name="$bold$green($(basename "$VIRTUAL_ENV"))"
        fi
        if git rev-parse --git-dir >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    	if ! git diff-index --quiet --cached HEAD 2>/dev/null || ! git diff-files --quiet; then
    	    local git_branch_color="$dim$red"
    	elif git ls-files --other --exclude-standard --error-unmatch . >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    	    local git_branch_color="$dim$yellow"
    	else
    	    local git_branch_color="$dim$green"
    	fi
        fi
        local git_branch="$git_branch_color"$(__git_ps1|tr -d " ")
        local chroot="$dim$magenta"${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}
        if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then # If root
    	local username_host_dir="$bold$red\h$bold$blue \W"
    	local prompt="$dim$cyan\$ "
        else
    	local username_host_dir="$dim$magenta\u@\h$dim$white:$dim$cyan\w"
    	local prompt="$dim$cyan> "
        fi
        local unmodify_color='\[\033[0;00m\]'
        local screen_hack='\[\033k\033\\\]'
        local end_prompt=$unmodify_color$screen_hack
  
        export PS1="$return_code$virtualenv_name$chroot$username_host_dir$git_branch $prompt$end_prompt"
        return $ret
    }
    export PROMPT_COMMAND="set_prompt_vars"