Switching to a Zsh Shell | Hacker News Reader

Switching to a Zsh Shell

stevelosh.com

35 pointsdavidblair12 comments

I spend a lot of time on the command line, and personally find having that much info in my prompt incredibly distracting. I would really prefer to leave things like battery monitoring to my OS or Window Manager - not my shell prompt. The screenshots in this article look like the kind of stuff that you do when you're just starting with a new piece of technology and you want to use every single feature just to play around. Cool and fun, but at the end of the day perhaps not very useful.

Actually I had most of that information in my bash prompt before I switched to Zsh (the battery level and repo-characters are the only things that are really new).

To get to that point I'd been poking around and tweaking for somewhere around 4-5 years, so no, it's not just a case of wanting to use as much of Zsh as possible. Actually very little of that prompt is Zsh-specific.

You might find it distracting, that's fine. I don't. My eyes/brain have adapted to recognize the prompt line(s) as a whole unit. I don't read every single item every single time I see the prompt. But when I do need a piece of information it's right there in front of me and my eyes can home in on it quickly thanks to the color-coding.

Examples:

When I'm switching directories a lot (maybe I'm setting up a new project and installing plugins) my eyes tend to focus on the green text in the center (current directory).

When I'm merging translation branches for hgtip.com's content repository my eyes focus on the magenta text near the right (the current branch).

When I'm using MQ a lot my eyes focus on the list of MQ patches.

The "dirty" flags ("?" and "!" at the right) always jump right out at me if they're there, because they're a different color than the text to the left of them and there's not even a space as a separator.

Agreed. Note that most of this eye candy can be put in a screen message line (I don't do that, but if I did that's where it would go). Most of it (except for the cwd) isn't really relevant to a specific command anyway.

Steve is using Oh My Zsh, which is one of my pet projects. You can find it on Github.

http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

I like having extra information in my prompt, but not to the point that it takes up a whole line of its own. Here's what mine looks like: http://grab.by/26hX

What do the special characters represent?

The first one is git status: Magenta means there are unstaged changes, cyan means there aren't. Star is master, I have different symbols for a few different branches I use on some projects. Otherwise, that symbol just shows as the branch name.

The second symbol is my currently-active ruby interpreter.

EDIT: see http://github.com/burke/dotfiles/tree/master/.config.d/zsh

To be honest, most of that stuff works just fine in BASH too.

http://gist.github.com/277975

That's my bash prompt, doing the same. Except, it doesn't factor in mercurial repositories, but that'll be a breeze to add.

Displaying: (<virtual_env>) user@host [ <folder> ~<branch> <* available changes>]$

Oh yeah, definitely. Like I mentioned in the post it could be pretty easily converted to bash (except for the RPROMPT), I just haven't gotten around to doing it.

There's a more general solution for putting VCS information in your zsh prompt called vcs_info. I don't know if it covers all the features of these hg and git prompts, but it does support svn and cvs (among others), which I still have to use for some projects.

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht...

Yeah, I've seen vcs_info around before. It's exactly like you said -- it supports more VCSes and it's quicker to set up than hand-rolling your own, but it's less flexible.

For a good zsh configuration have a look at http://grml.org/zsh/ (vcs_dir enabled prompt, persistend dir stack, directory based profile and many more)

For a general zsh overview have a look at http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html

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