this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Recently I stumbled over an article, about how to customize your shell prompt. What really surprised me, is that it lacked one of the most basic tips I learned nearly 20 years back: Always display a timestamp in the prompt, to be able to check how long a process is running or when it ended. (Don't need it daily, but every so often it saves my butt. ;-)) The other trick is to always have a colorful prompt, to easily discern where output from programs start/stop. In total my PS1 looks like this (with GIT status at the end): [\e[32m]\u[\e[m]@[\e[35m]\h[\e[m] [\e[36m]\A[\e[m] [\e[37m][[\e[m][\e[31m]\w[\e[m][\e[37m]][\e[m]$(__git_ps1 "(%s)")$

My question is, what customization, tips and tricks do you have for the shell prompt?

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[–] multicorn@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you like customizing your shell, there are really cool things one can do with zsh.

I have mine set up with suggestions to complete the name of the program, or even command line options for it.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago

zsh ... it is totally awesome, I saw a lot of crazy autocomplete stuff by people using it. I stick to bash mostly because it is simply installed everywhere and good enough for my needs. (With some help like autojump for bash.)