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Bash Prompts Collection

Bash Prompts Collection

19 comments

·August 28, 2025
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kragen

I strongly recommend against putting a ">" in your prompt on Unix if you're using any kind of system that supports copy and paste. (So, like, on a physical VT100 on a serial port it would be okay.) Sooner or later you're going to take a prompt-included command like

    > ls GN*
and accidentally paste it into a terminal window (or a web page that someone else pastes into a terminal window) and accidentally create an empty file named "ls". Or, in some cases, overwrite an existing file.

My own current setting is

    PS1=': ${env:+($env) }\W; '
Which looks like this:

    : ~; cd wak
    : wak; ls
    LICENSE   monosrc    scripts  toybox            toybox_awk_test
    Makefile  README.md  src      toybox_awk_parts
    : wak;
The :; has the advantage that, if you unintentionally include the prompt in your copy and paste, it usually has no effect. (Maybe I should change ($env) to [$env].) \W (the last segment of the directory name) is usually about the right amount of context for me, but if I were working on a project with a lot of directories named things like "views" I would probably reconsider that.

BTW, since this prompt collection was written, Linux terminal emulators have mostly gained 24-bit color support, which potentially opens up more alternative colors. See http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.c with sample results in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.png. The escape sequence is \033[38;2;rrr;ggg;bbbm, where \033 is ESC and rrr, ggg, and bbb are decimal numbers from 0 to 255.

(Probably I should switch from bash to zsh...)

oneshtein

I use Linux for 30 years. Never had this problem. However, I saw newbies, which copy paste commands from tutorials to shell and then frustrated, because # is a comment.

kragen

I bet you've never accidentally rm -rf'ed your home directory or your email archives either.

everybodyknows

Missing from all of these: Error code returned from previous command. Invaluable.

PeterWhittaker

Absolutely! Not only does filtering on $? provide info (last command interrupted, suspended, good, bad, etc.), it makes the prompt itself a quick way to test [[ ... ]] expressions....

(My prompt is platform aware since codes for some ops differ between MacOS and Linux. The return is colour-coded (green, red, purple, depending on case), and multiline, with git status if in a repo, cwd, and a few other things....)

procaryote

I was a bit surprised only one of them included showing if the last command succeeded or not. My $ being green if ok red otherwise is one of the few things I miss when using a stock prompt.

For bash users I can recommend looking into setting PS1 from a function and assigning that function to PROMPT_COMMAND as it makes it much easier to make it readable

grepfru_it

My buddy spike723 on EFnet built what I can only describe as a sentinent bash prompt. I recall it being massive and could show you everything about your system in a prompt.

25 years later I have no clue where this guy went but I remember him because he was instrumental in moving me off zsh to bash

dpflan

Right on, I've always enjoyed tinkering with my own `$PS1`. Why did you move from zsh to bash -- what bash features pulled you over?

nailer

I find it’s very valuable to have a time Delta in the prompt. Knowing how long something normally takes can help you catch situations where your five second test run turns into a 30 second test run very easily.

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okasaki

Like most customization and command replacements (like the fancy greps, ls's, etc), I've stopped using fancy prompts because I log in to lots of systems over the day and most of them won't have my prompt and this causes annoyance.

Also I have a theory that it lowers chatbot performance if you're copy pasting terminal output.

dpflan

I feel you, though this is why it's quite useful to have your own repo (or even just a dot file you can scp) with your dots files in them so you can "move in" to any machine and feel at home. Just clone/scp, then run your move in script.

This also applies to say vimrc (choose your editor/tool of choice).

r_lee

About that last part, what do you mean exactly?

One thing that comes to mind is it might make its output more aligned with data that includes the full terminal output, which could make it more copy-pastey?

okasaki

I mean that chatbots might have an easier time working with terminal output with the standard prompt rather than one that has your battery, weather, git branch and aws account in it.

It's just an idle thought though.

actionfromafar

Seems perfectly reasonable. Everything unrelated is an opportunity to go off the rails.

latchkey

Adopted:

  https://atuin.sh/
  https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh
  https://starship.rs/
These three have made my shell game so much more enjoyable.

phyzome

Now this is prompt engineering.

sixthDot

ty giles

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