zprompt

zprompt is a very fast and opinionated zsh prompt. It works for me. Maybe it works for you. The weirdest and most excellent thing it does is dispatching git status as an async job and rerendering the prompt with a spinner until it completes, then resolving the indicator to magenta (dirty) or green (clean).

Tip

This lets you have git dirty/clean information in your prompt even in a huge repo without your prompt taking longer to generate (it takes 5ms for me in our largest repository).

Screen.Recording.2024-10-16.at.2.35.18.PM.mov

The spinner assumes you're using a terminal with true color support because, come on, it's 2024, what the hell, Apple.

Using zprompt is a little weird because of this async job thing.

First off, it expects three environment variables:

• EXIT_STATUS - exit status of the last command
• SHELL_PID - pid of the shell rendering the prompt
• PS1_EXEC_NO - a number that changes each time a new prompt is generated

We use precmd_functions to set up PS1_EXEC_NO. The async rerender is handled by sending SIGALRM to the shell, which we handle and run zle reset-prompt to redraw the prompt. You don't really have to understand this, just paste this into your ~/.zshrc:

PROMPT='$(PS1_EXEC_NO=$__ps1_exec_no EXIT_STATUS=$? SHELL_PID=$$ zprompt)'
function __ps1_exec_incr() {
  __ps1_exec_no=$((__ps1_exec_no+1))
}
precmd_functions+=(__ps1_exec_incr)
TRAPALRM() {
  if [[ -n "$WIDGET" ]]; then
    zle reset-prompt
  fi
}

Configuration

zprompt has a handful of widgets. The default configuration (zprompt "%W%X%s%a%r%n%y %e%P%j ") is what I use, but you can assemble them in whichever way you like. You can probably call zprompt multiple times per prompt with different format strings if you want, but I would really strongly recommend against having %a multiple times per prompt!

• %p (path): last component of current working directory (with a grey background if there is an active shadowenv)
• %W (world_path): Shopify monorepo pretty-printed path.
• %X (space_if_git): a single space character, if currently in a git repo
• %s (stash): a superscript character indictating the number of git stash entries, if any
• %a (async_data): async git status (just a color code applied to the next element)
• %r (ref_inf): git ref - branch name or SHA. Uncolored, assumed to be colored by async_data
• %n (pending): visual indicator for any in-progress cherry-pick merge, bisect, or rebase operations.
• %y (sync): single character indicating if branch is out of sync with remote (or status is unknown)
• %e (exit): exit code in red if last command was unsuccessful
• %P (prompt): prompt char. % normally, # if root
• %j (jobs): number of running jobs (you'll see this if you Ctrl-Z something)