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Comment by proaralyst | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the very tricked out shells people have. Surely all those colours and bits of information are just noise that distracts over a longer shell session?

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I tend to feel the same way but then again I have a fair amount of information that can show up in my prompt, the difference however being that it is all black against a black background so the only time I see it is if I highlight a line. Works out well for having an information dense prompt but keeping the distractions and noise lower.

I absolutely love having a colourful shell -- assuming that each program doesn’t end up competing for your attention! I’m far more likely to notice an error if it’s red, or a warning if it’s yellow, as I find out about them subconsciously without having to read each line. However, if every program has a different idea of what an “error” is, then I’m just going to start ignoring red lines instead.

I agree with you. I set my $PS1 to just show the folder and the exit status of the previous command. I set the dirtrim to 2 so it looks something like this in action:

     0[~/.../a/folder]$ false
     1[~/.../a/folder]$

In my .bashrc:

    PROMPT_DIRTRIM=2
    PS1='\[\e]2;[\W]\$\a\]$(printf "%d" $?)[\w]\$ '

There are lots of folks here for which the shell interface is usefull, but difficult to use. Using colors and graphics can be super helpful for folks with dyslexia, along with asymmetric fonts (thing I learned this year: comic sans scores incredibly well as a font for people with dyslexia). So don't poke fun.

I don't have that problem, but I don't see any problem including redundancy. I have come to like Powerline-hs's git support because even if I only half-glimpse a window I immediately know the status of the repo from it just by the colors. I don't see why I wouldn't want to maximize the channels of information coming back to me.

I'm not arguing for a monochrome shell with no information; my current prompt is:

[user@hostname:path](git branch)$

There are colours highlighting these sections. What I'm referring to is the multi-line prompts with dates, times, uptimes etc that surely just clutter up the history view?

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