Pretty Terminal Prompts


Stephen Hara

June 15th

Pretty Terminal Prompts

This week I made some good progress on one of the more fun sections of my in-progress ebook on the terminal, a section on customizing your terminal experience.

I think we all want to have a good time using the terminal, especially if you spend a lot of time with it. My personal favorite part of customizing the terminal is the prompt, that fun little innocuous REPL handler.

Nowadays, there's a whole assortment of ready-to-go prompts, like in this awesome-bash repo. I personally just use the simple Starship.rs prompt, because it's blazingly fast and looks nice with lots of information about the current project.

Before I found Starship, though, I had my own gnarly PS1 string that printed the date-time, checked if you were in a virtualenv for Python work, even printed out info about running Docker containers. It was kinda cool, if a little, well, gnarly.

What kind of terminal customizations do you use?

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