An easily extensible collection of Bash Prompts.
Dot Bashprompt is a set of Bash functions that allows you to easily load colourful Bash Prompts and change them on the fly. If you have the inclination, it's intended to be extensible and easy to build your own prompt. It comes with a variety of ready-to-use prompts.
image: The 'promnow' function of Dot Bashprompt in action, showing several default prompts
In the above image, the first prompt is "ogr256" ("Orange Grey, 256 colours") which requires a 256 colour terminal (that's common these days, although it still requires tweaking in Debian?). The "onetwo" prompt changes from one line to two depending on how much content it has to display - the clock in the upper right corner of the terminal was placed there by it as well. The "singletons2" prompt reduces directory names, except for the last one, to a single character (or two characters if there's a leading dot). "overload" has too much information - including the number of files, links, directories, and how much space they take up. Both "overload" and "singletons2" display "ephemeral" information (ie. after the prompt, that you may end up typing over top of).
Run git clone https://github.com/gilesorr/dotbashprompt.git ~/.bashprompt. If you choose to check this out anywhere other than
~/.bashprompt, edit promnow and modify the one hard-coded line that
references the directory location. Now source ~/.bashprompt/promnow and
finally run 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>). promnow
includes and loads its own completions: you can tab-complete any prompt
name.
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 one-two > /dev/null # replace "one-two" 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.
Please see the Examples.md file for instructions on how to use the provided components to build your own prompts.
If you're wondering "why do your prompts look the way they do?", I answer that question at length in The Bash Prompt Layout Manifesto. The title makes it sound like "everything should be thus and so," but it's more "this is what I like and maybe it will help you think about what you want to see in a prompt."
I design prompts using a terminal with a black background. This means these 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 possibility it will break the prompts. I try to use
command grep to get around local aliases and functions, but this hasn't
been applied entirely consistently.
One of the colours available (there aren't many - or at least older terminals only have 16 choices) 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 usually represented as ... black. Making prompts that use this colour appear somewhat broken. No fix yet - particularly since a prompt can't predict the local terminal configuration.
I use Bash 5 on Linux, and Homebrew's Bash 5 on Mac, not Apple's (extremely old) Bash 3. 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.
I want to thank Srikanth Agaram: it was his pointer to his prompt setup that inspired me to create 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.
Pretty much all of these projects suffer from the same one mine does: complexity. Setting up prompts, particularly ones that give you several pieces of information, is complex and often opaque to the end user. Choose your poison ...
- https://starship.rs/ - Starship, a prompt mechanism for several shells
- 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?)
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 ...