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Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

I used to use zsh but switched back to bash a couple years ago simply because the benefit wasn't worth the trouble. When I first changed back I went to some difficulty to get my PS1 to have color in it. That slowly faded away and now I have a visceral, negative reaction to prompts with that much colorful whizzy fu. Maybe in a few more years I'll trim out the username/hostname/path and become content with just a %.

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This is exactly what I've done for the past year. I realized that most of the time, I know which directory I'm in, I know which user I am, and I know which host I'm on. It's trivial to look up any of these (as well as other crazy things people embed in their PS1).

Now my prompt is nothing but a green ">> " on a black background. I'm not deluding myself when I say that the reduced clutter improves my productivity.

To each their own. I'm logged in to at least 5 different hosts at any given time, often many more. Without user/hostname in the prompt and the term-title I'd be completely lost.

In your case, your goal is to reduce the cognitive weight of your environment.

A host name in the prompt is one more string you need to read and it's a user interface mistake as a term is for entering commands and reading their output.

I've seen people successfully using different background colors for visually telling their terms apart. It's a very good solution as there's no reading cost.

I personally use workspaces to sort terms by host and this can be very powerful if combined with tagging. This also works well but I suspect it's linked to my workflow.

It faded away because it was too difficult to get the prompt working?

When you have access to a lot of machines run by different organizations but not administration privileges on most of them, it's a hassle.

So put your zsh config in a git repo, clone it wherever you need it and symlink to the repo?

Uh huh. Now I have to install git on all those computers as well as make sure there's a recent-enough copy of zsh. Much less work that way.

Or I can just use the bash that's already there.

Your concern about git however is unrelated to shell choice. I customize bash quite a bit (my own completions, etc.) and maintain dotfiles in a git repository. I have a post-receive hook that tars up my dotfiles and puts them at a public location on my http server that only I know about so that I can easily get them when I'm on a machine without git. I'm not going to do that for every machine, but if I'm stuck debugging something on some odd machine, at the very last I want my vim settings around.

It makes more sense for vim than zsh though. What color your prompt is has a lot less bearing on your productivity than your editor configuration. (Though I don't do much of that either).

I am of the same practice as fusiongyro. I also expand on that and have a very simple configuration for Vim. Once you go beyond a handful of machines, you never know what to expect on the system. "Lowest common denominator" wins out for me almost everytime.

This was an honest question to clarify what was meant by faded away... I appreciated the response... what is the problem? Sheesh

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