Proposal: configure Pure colors via prompt init

[mafredri]

We receive a lot of requests for changing colors in Pure, one prevalent reason is color blindness and hard-to-distinguish colors. Many of the themes that ship with Zsh allow color schemeability during prompt init and I believe we could utilize this in Pure as well.

Example:

Usage: prompt pure [<status_ok_color> [<status_error_color> [<path_color> [<git_color> [<arrow_color> [<duration_color> [<username_color> [<root_color>]]]]]]]]

prompt pure magenta red blue 242 cyan yellow 242 white

These could maybe even be just color1, color2, etc.

Benefits:

• No backwards incompatibility
• No new environment options
• Allows changing all colors (or as many as we expose, maybe a more limited set would be better, to begin with)

Downsides:

• "Hard" to change just one color (previous colors must also be filled)
• Colors can't officially¹ be changed at runtime based on whatever reason, e.g. inside a read-only directory, so the user would want to change the directory prompt to red, or whatever...
• Do we need to document how each color affects the prompt?

¹ Unofficially the internals are probably such that the user could change them, but this would of course be unsupported and could break at any time.

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As a bonus, we could implement prompt_pure_help to provide a help dialogue (on how to use/modify pure) for the user. This can be displayed with prompt -h pure.

References:

• Add support for custom prompt arrow color (Add support for custom prompt arrow color #256)
• Feature request | arrow prompt ❯ color (Feature request | arrow prompt ❯ color #303)
• Others: Add ability to change prompt colors #292, Custom Colors #155

// ping @sindresorhus

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Backers (Total: $80.00)

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Submitted pull Requests

• #472 configure colors with zstyle

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[sindresorhus]

Does ZSH have a nicer way to do options? I don't like positional arguments like this, and environment variables are global.

[sindresorhus]

Maybe something like zstyle ':pure:prompt' success 'green'. (No idea if this works or not)

[mafredri]

We could definitely use zstyle, it's a bit more verbose to use in the pure source, but it's just one extra line to fetch the current configuration.

What you're proposing would work, but it might be good to put them in a subcategory:

zstyle :prompt:pure:color duration yellow
zstyle :prompt:pure:color error red
zstyle :prompt:pure:color branch 242
zstyle :prompt:pure:color unpushed cyan
zstyle :prompt:pure:color unpulled cyan
zstyle :prompt:pure:color root white
zstyle :prompt:pure:color success green
zstyle :prompt:pure:color user 242

This could even allow different theming based on if you're in a git directory or not, say we started supporting mercurial:

zstyle :prompt:pure:git:color branch 242
zstyle :prompt:pure:hg:color branch red

Not sure how this would look in practice, but it should be possible. Not sure if there's value in it.

One issue with this approach is that it doesn't really decrease the amount of configuration, but perhaps allows us to keep "colors" to simply one section?

[sindresorhus]

What you're proposing would work, but it might be good to put them in a subcategory:

👍

[sindresorhus]

@mafredri So it seems we agree on the solution. Should we label this as "help wanted" (PR welcome)?

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