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Comment by m_fam_wa_k | Hacker News Reader

I like to color code my terminal. Production systems are always red. Dev are blue/green. Staging is yellow.

All of my non-production machines have emojis in PS1 somewhere. It sounds ridiculous, but I know that if I see a cheeseburger or a burrito I'm not about to completely mess everything up. Silly terminal = silly data that I can obliterate.

I think I'd rather make the production systems stand out, and add the emojis there. My prompts have a red background, but emoji prompts just tickle me, somehow.

I've been color-coding my PS1 for years, but this is seriously brilliant, thanks!

I got the idea of an emoji prompty that is happy or sad depending on the $? value from somebody here a few years ago.

I run it on any dev environment since then.

ha! I do the same thing with figlet and cowsay, it prints a big dragon saying "welcome to shell!", if I see that, then I know I'm on a box I own/have sudo/am me. it's a good visual reminder. I don't fuss with prompts much, but this is a pretty good idea!

It seems Gitlab has noticed your comment.

Recovery item 3f currently says:

> Create issue to change terminal PS1 format/colours to make it clear whether you’re using production or staging (red production, yellow staging)

I use iterm2's "badging" to set a large text badge on the terminal of the name of the system as part of my SSH-into-ec2-systems alias:

    i2-badge ()
    {
      printf "\e]1337;SetBadgeFormat=%s\a" $(echo -n "$1" | base64)
    }

It's not quite as good as having a separate terminal theme, but then I haven't been able to use that feature properly. :(

This is a great idea! Documentation https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-badges.html -- supports emojis too fwiw

Didn't know about this feature, gonna have to use this thanks!

In this case it looks like it has been a confusion between two different replicated Production databases. So this would not have helped.

Yep, good idea. The same thing has been suggested by team members http://imgur.com/a/TPt7O

I do this too, but in this case both machines were production, so this alone would not have sufficed. The system-default prompts on the other hand are universally garbage.

I have a user and a local admin account at work on our Windows SOE. I have made my PC's cmd.exe show green on black in large font, but intentionally did not change the local admin. When I run a command prompt in admin it's visible different. This is a great tip and it's caught me many times.

If using iterm you can set a "badge" text on a terminal window that shows up as an overlay. Super useful when you have lots of SSH sessions open to different servers.

iterm badges have saved me many times.

Is a really good idea, and is one of the improvements that are likely to be put in place as soon as possible. Its already listed on the document.

I've done this exact thing my my servers. Also like GL I prepend PRODUCTION and STAGING on PS1.

I should probably make the PRODUCTION flash just in case.

We need a <blink> tag for our PS1.

Good news! Enable ANSI in your terminal and: ESC[5m

http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/terminalcodes

You can do that - I actually tried it and everyone on my team agreed that it was bloody annoying, so I made it stop blinking (still red, though).

Not as serious, but I always set root terminals on my system to be this scary red.

How do you go about colour coding your terminal?

I assume he color coded the prompt. You can use ANSI color escape codes in there to e.g. color your hostname.

Here's a generator for Bash: http://bashrcgenerator.com/, the prompt's format string is stored in the $PS1 variable.

My dev is yellow, staging orange, and live red

How exactly do you color code it?

for example, in .bashrc on osx:

   RED=$(tput setaf 1)
   NORMAL=$(tput sgr0)
   PS1="\[${RED}\]PROD \[${NORMAL}\]\W\$ "

produces prompt

PROD ~$ <-- prod in red, directory ~

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