[COFF] What is your prompt? (was: ksh88 source code?)

[John P. Linderman]

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 at 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 at andykosela.com> wrote:

> On 12/22/21, Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > MacOS finally pushed me to zsh.  So I went all the way and installed
> > oh-my-zsh.  It makes me feel very dirty, and I have a two-line prompt
> (!!),
> > but I can't deny it's convenient.
> >
> > tickets/DM-32983 ✗
> > adam at m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$
> >
> > (and in my terminal, the X glyph next to my git branch showing the status
> > is dirty is red while the branch name is green)
> >
> > and if something doesn't exit with rc=0...
> >
> > adam at m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$ fart
> > zsh: command not found: fart
> > tickets/DM-32983 ✗127 ⚠️
> > adam at m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$
> >
> > Then I also get the little warning glyph and the rc of the last command
> in
> > my prompt.
> >
> > But then I'm also now using Fira Code with ligatures in my terminal, so
> > I've pretty much gone full Red Lightsaber.
>
> I try to keep my prompt as simple as possible.  For years I have been
> using:
>
>   moon $
>
> That 's it.  No fancy colors, not even displaying current working
> directory.  I have an alias 'p' for that.
>
> --Andy
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