Hi. I’ve been using powerlevel10k for a long time, but a few days ago, I decided I wanted to customize it a bit. I opened the .p10k.zsh file, and I was shocked. It’s really massive, with TONS of options. I’ve been digging through for a few hours already, and it’s absolutely amazing how much you can customize it without actually programming anything. I was wondering what other people are using. So my questions are:
- Do you customize your shell prompt?
- If yes, do you use some framework or pre-made theme, or do you just configure it the vanilla way in your bashrc/zshrc/…
- How is your experiences with it so far?
- Share screenshot of your prompts, please (Sadly, my prompt is currently half done, so I can’t really share it)
I use plain old bash with the plain old .bashrc that ships with Debian. I’ll bolt on a git-branch-aware function into the prompt here and there, but that’s about it.
Why? I ssh into a few dozen machines most days and my shitty little lizard brain can’t deal with everything being different on each box. So as much as I appreciate zsh, powerline plug-ins, all that glitzy stuff, I’ll be a late adopter when it comes to plain old Debian stable…
I wrote an Ansible playbook to install my zsh stuffs into a remote machine. I don’t run it against every machine though, just the ones where I ssh into particularly often and have the freedom to customize the shell.
freedom to customize the shell
This is always the issue for me – I ssh into several machines for various clients every day. All of those clients have one thing in common: equally strict and inconsistent policies about what packages you can use from where and for what reason. “I like this shell better” would never fly, sadly.
This was me until the kubernetes transition occurred. Now I ssh into nothing unless it’s a personal box. I’ve become a zsh convert.
I’ve been casually transitioning to kubernetes and zsh, but I’m just too comfortable with bash and my os running on bare metal. (He says with more than half his apps switched to containers.) It’s simple, effective, and is always available. I should take the plunge, someday.
Fish, with Starship. It does everything I need it to, completely unmodified. In comparison, zsh barely reached feature parity with a dozen plugins, and I just don’t want to spend my time on that
I love fish.
Sometimes I wonder why people think using the terminal is so hard, then every once in a while when I’m not on my home PC and have to use Bash I get reminded of why
I’ve been meaning to try zsh since it can supposedly do everything fish can while still being posix compliant, but I’ve never felt the need to not be using fish so I just never got around to it
I’ve been using zsh with oh-my-zsh for almost a decade, but sounds like I might want to try Fish + Starship.
I use Zsh with the Oh My Zsh! framework, and I use a different theme depending on which subuserland I’m in, by customising ~/.zshrc. For example, I use the gentoo theme on Debian and its derivatives, agnoster on NixOS, darkblood on Arch, strug for Mageia, apple on my macOS device, aussiegeek on FreeBSD, and gallifrey on OpenBSD. Different themes helps me remember which package manager to use and which distro-specific commands will work.
I’ll send some screenshots in a bit, when I boot up my PC.
I like Zsh because of its tab completion and command history. I also quite like its plugins.
Before anyone asks, I have tried Fish before, and I prefer Zsh. I have tried configuring Bash before, and I prefer Zsh. I have played with Ksh and Tcsh on BSD, and I prefer Zsh. I used PowerShell a long time ago, and I prefer Zsh.
I use fish + tide
I tried zsh+p10k before fish+tide, but zsh felt annoying in subtle ways that weren’t fixable with (existing) plugins, so I switched back to fish, but installed tide to mimic my previous p10k theme.
