Tired of overly complicated shell prompts? I am 😡

Since some time ago there seems to be a trend of overly complicated shell prompts. A hell lot of useless information, infinite colors, complex scripts, plugins, multiline prompts… multiline prompts!!

I spend some time in a shell and wonder what I really need in my bash prompt.

By default, a normal installation will show username and host. Do I relly need that? Probably not, I know who I am and I know where I am.

If not (I’m a different user or I am in a different place) chances are that I will have this information.

But most of the time, I am who I am and I stay in my local machine.

There are a few pieces of information that I find useful though:

• what time is it? Yes, there is clock in the top bar of the desktop, but it’s too far away and I am not looking at it. I helps with time management!
• which directory I am in, definitely useful
• In case I’m working in version controlled stuff, which branch am I working in, is my git repo clean? After a lot of hesitation, I decided this might be useful too.

Enough.

So this is all I need:

How to get it?

$ cat ~/.bashrc
[...]
# bash simple prompt with git information
function parse_git_dirty {
  [[ $(git status --porcelain 2> /dev/null) ]] && echo "*"
}
function parse_git_branch {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e "s/* \(.*\)/ (\1$(parse_git_dirty))/"
}

export PS1="\[\e[32m\]\A \[\e[96m\]\w\[\e[93m\]\$(parse_git_branch)\[\e[00m\] $ "
[...]

Enjoy your simple bash prompt!