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?
Use PS1="▌\t▐\n\w→" to display your local time each time you press enter. And make aliases of lengthy commands such as alias internettest="curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py | python -" (You need to install python to run this.)
I make it green for an ssh session, and red when I’m root. That’s it, nothing fancy.
Damn it! That is such an obvious great idea, I feel like an idiot! Thank you very much! :-)
Any advice/guide how to change the color for ssh sessions?
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.
Step 1. Install fish shell
Step 2. Type fish_config
Step 3. Profit
Most prompt customizers have an option for showing how long last command ran and whether it succeeded/failed or simply prompt timestamp, it’s often default. I use Tide, there’s also Starship and a number of others. You can also roll your own ofcourse.
