Dot Bashprompt
An easily extensible collection of Bash Prompts.
Dot Bashprompt is a set of Bash functions that allows you to easily create complex Bash Prompts, and change them on the fly. If you have the inclination, it's also intended to be extensible and easy to build your own prompt. It also comes with a variety of ready-to-use prompts.
Getting Started
Run git clone https://github.com/gilesorr/dotbashprompt.git ~/.bashprompt
followed by source ~/.bashprompt/promnow and finally promnow which
will give you basic usage information, including instructions on how to
immediately change your prompt to one of those available in the repository
(promnow <prompt-name>). Please note that - for now - this probably
won't work if it's not checked out to the ~/.bashprompt/ folder. Tab
completion is available on prompt names.
If you want to continue to use a particular prompt, edit your ~/.bashrc and add the following lines at the end:
source ~/.bashprompt/promnow
promnow <prompt-name> > /dev/null # replace with the name of a prompt you like
Sending the output to /dev/null squashes the prompt announcement, which
is only really useful when you're interactively changing prompts.
Known Issues
I design prompts using a terminal with a black background. This means the prompts commonly look lousy with a light or white background. This is being addressed, but slowly. Design a better one and send me a pull request.
If you've aliased any Unix utility used by the prompt functions (this
includes but isn't limited to things like ls, grep, awk, and
sed), there's a very good possibility it will break the prompts. I'm
adding unalias -a to the functions to avoid this, but if you've used a
function overlay of a common utility like ls, there's nothing I can do.
One of the colours available (there aren't many) for making prompts is, reasonably enough, "black". Under Linux, "bold black" is actually a dark gray. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but there it is. And when you have limited choices, you go with what's available. Unfortunately, on the Mac, "bold black" is represented as ... black. Making prompts that use this colour appear somewhat broken. No fix yet.
I use Bash 5 on Linux, and Homebrew's Bash 5 on Mac, not Apple's default (and extremely old) Bash 3. (MacOS Catalina now defaults to ZSH.) I don't think I'm using any Bash-4+-only constructs, but that may eventually happen which could potentially break some prompts on Mac Bash 3.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Srikanth Agaram: it was his pointer to his prompt setup that started me creating this project. If you're interested in constructing your own prompt(s), looking at what he's done will give you a somewhat different perspective on the same subject.
Other Projects
- https://powerline.readthedocs.io/en/master/ - Powerline is best known as a plugin for Vim, but can also be used for Bash (and ZSH and Fish and ...) prompts.
- https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt
- http://bashish.sourceforge.net/ (last updated 2006?)
Bibliography
man bash- The Bash Prompt HOWTO (also written by me ... it's a subject I'm interested in). It's old, but still technically correct. I keep meaning to update it ...