Pimp My Prompt … like Paul Irish

By chris

May 8, 2011

~/.bash_profile Contents

Run the git completion script so that commands like __git_ps1 are available:

# enable the git bash completion commands
source ~/.git-completion

Turn on a couple of options for use with the __git_ps1 script. Please see the comments in .git-completion for an explanation on what each one does (I don’t want to duplicate their documentation here):

# enable git unstaged indicators - set to a non-empty value
GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE="."

# enable showing of untracked files - set to a non-empty value
GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES="."

# enable stash checking - set to a non-empty value
GIT_PS1_SHOWSTASHSTATE="."

# enable showing of HEAD vs its upstream
GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM="auto"

Set some variables that will be called as shell commands later – these ones are for changing the text colour. I’m not using all these colours in this script but they’re useful to know. Note that I found these colours on a Stack Overflow question titled "How do I get my iTerm prompt to display differently when I’m in a Git branch?" – thanks SiegeX.

BLACK=$(tput setaf 0)
RED=$(tput setaf 1)
GREEN=$(tput setaf 2)
YELLOW=$(tput setaf 3)
LIME_YELLOW=$(tput setaf 190)
POWDER_BLUE=$(tput setaf 153)
BLUE=$(tput setaf 4)
MAGENTA=$(tput setaf 5)
CYAN=$(tput setaf 6)
WHITE=$(tput setaf 7)
BRIGHT=$(tput bold)
NORMAL=$(tput sgr0)
BLINK=$(tput blink)
REVERSE=$(tput smso)
UNDERLINE=$(tput smul)

Add a function that figures out whether or not you’re in a git branch (for showing the prompt prefix):

# return the prompt prefix for the second line
function set_prefix {
	BRANCH=`__git_ps1`
	if [[ -z $BRANCH ]]; then
		echo "${NORMAL}o"
	else
		echo "${UNDERLINE}+"
	fi
}

Set the prompt itself. Please remember that I’m guessing at Paul’s actual usage but this is pretty close:

# and here's one similar to Paul Irish's famous prompt ... not sure if this is the way he does it, but it works  :)
# 33[s = save cursor position
# 33[u = restore cursor position

PS1='${MAGENTA}u${WHITE} in ${GREEN}w${WHITE}${MAGENTA}`__git_ps1 " on %s"`${WHITE}rn`set_prefix`${NORMAL}${CYAN}33[s33[60C (`date "+%a, %b %d"`)33[u${WHITE} '

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