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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Im glad I was able to help!

    Something that should be noted when adding colors to your shell prompt function is adding the non printable characters that keep the terminal from buggin out, this caused me a massive headache until I figured it out. When putting it in the PS1 variable directly you will put \[ to begin a color sequence and \] to end one, but printf will print a literal [ and ] so instead you will have to use \001 to start and \002 to end, I also recommend changing \e to \033 or \x1B to make things a bit more portable. For a quick example \[\e[1;31m\] would become \001\033[1;31m\002. Without these characters the terminal will like glitch out when you type a long command and then go back to the front.

    If you are like messing around or trying to learn a new programming language, you can try like porting your shell prompt to that language, Ive ported mine to C and set it using the same subsitution shell method, I thought it was a fun lil challenge.

    But anyways, I hope you have fun customizing your shell prompt!


  • A person in this thread already recommended having different colors for different conditions like ssh and running as root, I havent seen anyone mention this specifically but you can determine if the current working directory is writable with something like [ -w "$(pwd)" ] and set the color to red or print a symbol if it doesnt return true.

    Also I recommend putting all the code and logic for your shell prompt in a shell function, and using a substitution shell to put it into the PS1 variable like this:

    __shellprompt ()
    {
    	if [ "$(id -u)" = 0 ]; then
    		local PROMPT_EMBLEM='#'
    	else
    		local PROMPT_EMBLEM='$'
    	fi
    	printf "%s" "$(whoami)@$(uname -n):$(pwd)"
    	printf "\n%c " "$PROMPT_EMBLEM"
    }
    PS1='$(__shellprompt)'
    

    Now this is just a really barebones example, there is a whole lot more you can do like passing in the last exit code through the argv of your shellprompt function like this PS1='$(__shellprompt $?)' and like print it out if its non-zero so you wont have to like echo $? to see if the last command failed, but you should be able to still do this. In my testing, running the shell prompt function in the subsitiution shell didnt effect the $? variable.

    In my first comment on another thread about shell prompts, I posted my full shellprompt, it is slightly outdated (I just changed hostname to uname -n), if you cant find it feel free to send a message or just ask, and I will send you the code.


  • I designed this prompt shortly after I switched to Linux, I’ve been using it for a while, it has a few features like putting the exit code if it isn’t 0, changing the hostname color if its detected that you are over ssh, changing the directory color to red if it isn’t writeable, changing the prompt color to red if your euid is 0, and instead of printing I have no name! when your user does not have an entry in the passwd file, it will just print your uid in red. I also have a version that I wrote in C that works the same way with a subsitution shell, but it was harder to sync across all my devices when I made a change, so I rewrote it in posix shell that could be synced with just my .bashrc and work almost anywhere.

    I don’t know how to post a screenshot, sorry for the long paragraph, but here is the source code, feel free to share or do whatever with it!

    #-----PS1-----#
    BOLDRED="\001\033[1;31m\002"
    BOLDBLUE="\001\033[1;34m\002"
    BOLDPURPLE="\001\033[1;35m\002"
    BOLDCYAN="\001\033[1;36m\002"
    BOLDGREEN="\001\033[1;32m\002"
    COLORRESET="\001\033[0m\002"
    CURSOR_BLINK="\001\033[5 q\002"
    INFO_COLOR=$BOLDGREEN
    SUPERUSER_COLOR=$BOLDRED
    NORMALUSER_COLOR=$BOLDCYAN
    SSH_COLOR=$BOLDPURPLE
    __shellprompt ()
    {
            if [ "$(id -u)" = 0 ]; then
                    PROMPT_COLOR=$SUPERUSER_COLOR
                    PROMPT_EMBLEM='#'
            else
                    PROMPT_COLOR=$NORMALUSER_COLOR
                    PROMPT_EMBLEM='$'
            fi
            # [user@hostname]
            printf "%b%s%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR}[${INFO_COLOR}" "$(whoami 2>/dev/null || (printf "%b%s" "${BOLDRED}" "UID:$(id -u)"))" "${PROMPT_COLOR}@"
            if [ -n "${SSH_TTY}" ] || [ -n "${SSH_CLIENT}" ]; then
                    printf "%b" "$SSH_COLOR"
            else
                    printf "%b" "$INFO_COLOR"
            fi
            printf "%s%b" "$(hostname)" "${PROMPT_COLOR}]"
            # :
            printf "%b" "${COLORRESET}:"
            # (/pwd)
            printf "%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR}("
            if [ -w "$PWD" ]; then
                    printf "%b" "${INFO_COLOR}"
            else
                    printf "%b" "${BOLDRED}"
            fi
            if [ -n "$HOME" ] && [ "$HOME" != "/" ] && { [ "$PWD" = "$HOME" ] || [ "$PWD" != "${PWD#"$HOME/"}" ]; }; then
                    printf "%s" "~${PWD#"$HOME"}"
            else
                    printf "%s" "${PWD}"
            fi
            printf "%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR})${COLORRESET}"
            # :(EXITCODE)
            if [ "$1" != 0 ]; then
                    printf "%b" "${COLORRESET}:"
                    printf "%b%s%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR}(${BOLDRED}" "${1}" "${PROMPT_COLOR})${COLORRESET}"
            fi
            # ->$
            # ->#
            printf "%b" "\n${PROMPT_COLOR}->${PROMPT_EMBLEM} ${COLORRESET}${CURSOR_BLINK}"
    }
    export PS1='$(__shellprompt $?)'
    #-----PS1-----#