I've been a "fancy prompt" fan for decades. It started when I got (possibly the first) CRT (HP2641?) at Bell Labs with command re-entry capability. I put a @ at the end of my prompt, so when I re-entered a line, the prompt itself would disappear (@ was the default line-kill character in the pre-internet era). As it got possible to make ksh prompts fancier, I put a newline at the end of the prompt, and used command number, host name, and working directory, color coded (although that may well not show up): 1896 jpl:/home/jpl/Downloads Easy to visually distinguish prompts from commands, and copy/paste commands. And I jiggered a local cd command to put user@host ptty current-directory window-size in the terminal window title. Handier before I retired, when I had many hosts I might be visiting with ssh. Overkill, arguably, but CPU cycles are cheap now. On Thu, Dec 23, 2021 at 2:00 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:

On 12/22/21 11:59 PM, Andy Kosela wrote: Pre-Script: Seeing as how this is COFF and it's supposed to be a slow day at work (holding down the fort while others celebrate) I'll chime in. What follows is what the type of thing that I'd be interested in reading from others. I've been a *LONG* *TIME* advocate for having at the very minimum 1) the (current) username and 2) the hostname in the prompt. This became exceedingly apparent at my last job with a bunch of junior admins, too many of which (read: > 0), inadvertently issued commands as the wrong user and / or on the wrong host. I personally like having the current working directory in the prompt. After some other incidents at my previous job, I started advocating for having the leading character in the prompt be a "#" so that most shells would not interpret it as a command pasted with trailing carriage return. This brings me to the quintessential Bash / Zsh PS1 prompt of: PS1="#[\u@\h:\w]\$ " The square brackets are effectively eye candy. The \$ evaluates to indication of if you're running as a normal user or root. It's largely superfluous with \u in the prompt. But it makes things uniform and reduces questions when others are learning things. When I migrated to Zsh, my prompt got a bit more complex. The base prompt in a new terminal window still looks mostly the same as the above PS1. The biggest difference is that I use Zsh's RPROMPT for transient things like the previous commands return code ($?) and date & time (the prompt was printed). The RPROMPT has the nice feature of it leaves the screen when when the current command is executed, thus it doesn't clutter screen scroll back. I'm leveraging Zsh's conditional prompt features to make the return code ($?) stand out in bright white on bright red when $? != 0. My shell initialization files conditionally set various environment variables which are used in the prompt. Conditionally on things like: - the TERM type - my terminal emulator's answer back - used for terminal specific features - shell level - if the shell is forked from inside of screen / tmux - if the shell is forked from inside of vim Depending on the TERM type and my terminal's answer back I'll either include control sequences to set the window title to (simplified version of) the PS1 prompt. This way I have a good idea from the window title when selecting minimized windows from lists, where the terminal therein is. I'm leveraging Zsh's preexec() function to conditionally set the window title to the command that's being executed if answer back indicates a supported terminal emulator. I'm comparing the host name to the value of answer back to set the prompt color as a simple indicator if I'm on my local system or not. - Green = terminal to local system - Yellow = terminal to a non-local system - Red = terminal as root window somewhere, BE CAREFUL So ... my Zsh prompt has a fair bit behind it. But the bulk of what's printed is still the comment character, the username, the hostname, the current working directory, and the (non)root indicator. One deviation is that I now have my root prompt (via sudo / su) slightly different in that after the effective user name, root, the prompt also includes my real user name in parenthesis. #[root(gtaylor)@host:~]# As I do more with containers, I'm getting ready to implement a similar permutation on the host portion such that the host name portion reflects the container's / network namespace's value of \h with parent host OS's name in side of parenthesis, much like the effective / logged in user pair. #[root(gtaylor)@netns(host):~]# Post-Script: Happy holidays. Here's hoping that things are going well for you and yours. -- Grant. . . . unix || die