Comments on: Best bash prompt. Ever.

By: Philippe

Philippe — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:03:31 +0000

I think I finally figured it out :
http://www.box.net/shared/kxauj9ezym

Thank you very much for this smiley idea, I think it’s a great ergonomic improvement.

By: Philippe

Philippe — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:58:13 +0000

I mean, this *should* work. But it does’nt :(

PS1=”$(if [ $? = 0 ] ; then echo “:)” ; else echo “:(“; fi) # “

By: Philippe

Philippe — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:14:28 +0000

This is both awesome and horrible

It’s handsome because I too like to have a visual clue to point my old a deficient brain to a compile error

It’s horrible because it combines the export and the test, rendering the code so obfuscated that any editor syntax parser will choke on it (let alone a human) and colorize it wrongly.

I’d really like to find a workaround ; The catch is that the test must be done late, otherwise you might get return codes of another command, if not the test itself.
I tried putting the test in a function, and then calling COMMAND_PROMPT=myfunction but I could not get it to work. Any help ?

anyway, i like it. Thanks Dave.

By: TheBonsai

TheBonsai — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 06:06:42 +0000

@willdye

For the specific ANSI codes, there is no real technical reason. tput setaf/setab produce ANSI codes per definition (setaf – “set ANSI foreground”).

It gets interesting for all other codes that are not ANSI specific or defined in ANSI but may be implemented differently in your terminal (maybe a better version of it, or similar). What tput improves is the code readability, even for ANSI color codes. Direct ESC sequences look crazy in the code, compared to a $(tput ….).

By: William Dye ("willdye")

William Dye ("willdye") — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:34:55 +0000

For what it’s worth, I tend to avoid using the ASCII escape codes directly, preferring code such as “blue=$(tput setaf 4 2) instead. According to http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/037 and http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php?id=scripting:terminalcodes the tput method is preferred, though I can’t think of an instance in which either method caused a serious problem for me.

By: Ice

Ice — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:50:50 +0000

Great tip, thanks. I love your blog! I'm using it with some modifications (root in red, full path, shows svn revision):

export PS1='`if [ \\$? = 0 ];
    then
        echo -e "33[0m[$(test \u = root && echo 33[31mroot33[0m || echo \u)@\h $(pwd) $(svn info 2>&1 | grep Revision &> /dev/null && (echo -n "33[1;34m" ; echo -n $(svn info | grep Revision:) ; echo -n "33[0m"))]33[32m\$33[0m ";
    else
        echo -e "33[0m[$(test \u = root && echo 33[31mroot33[0m || echo \u)@\h $(pwd) $(svn info 2>&1 | grep Revision &> /dev/null && (echo -n "33[1;34m" ; echo -n $(svn info | grep Revision:) ; echo -n "33[0m"))]33[31m\$33[0m ";
    fi; `'

By: Tobias

Tobias — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:16:59 +0000

Saw it, used it (with modifications), love it. Bonta-kun’s suggestion is great.

By: Kathryn

Kathryn — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:09:47 +0000

This is great, totally using it. :)

By: Bonta-Kun

Bonta-Kun — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:11:33 +0000

It’s not so bad, especially the coloring by exit-code.

However, you might want to do something like: user@host:cwd (that is, put the current directory next to the host). Then you can use the whole string as an ssh/scp target/source…

Also, coloring the username differently depending on being root or not can really save you :)

By: Jamie Smith

Jamie Smith — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:18:28 +0000

I would like to prompt your bash.