Hardscrabble 🍫

Edit: This post is kind of sloppy. Please consider reading this later, similar post instead.

So this is fun. Most of us at school have some symbol or emoji in our bash prompts. I’ve had a little piggie emoji for a few weeks which has served me fine but I’d like to introduce some… chance into my life. I want to have a random emoji in my prompt. Originally I wanted a new icon on a per-terminal-session basis but then I decided I wanted a new one after every command.

Here’s a simple Ruby script to print a random emoji from a nice subset of positive ones (no murder weapons or pills or bills)¹:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# encoding: UTF-8
emoji = %w{🐖 🐊 🐗 💾 💡 ☕ 🍆 🍆 🍆 🍆 🎈 👾}
print emoji[rand(emoji.length)]

I have this exact file saved in my home directory. It’s a dotfile (hidden file) because for the most part I don’t want to see it. Maybe there’s a better place to put it.

In order to get the output of that script into my prompt, I need to udpate my PS1 bash variable. In order to refresh it after every command I need to do this weird thing I’ve never done before (this goes in my bash profile):

function set_prompt {
  export PS1="[\@] [\W]\n$(~/.emoji.rb)  "
}
export PROMPT_COMMAND=set_prompt

The PROMPT_COMMAND variable can be assigned some shell script code to run before every drawing of the prompt. In this case, it’s calling a function called set_prompt, which runs the Ruby program and interpolates its response into the PS1 variable, so it’s different each time.

In order for the Ruby script to be executable by other code, we need to adjust its permissions. If you don’t do this, you get an error instead of a pig. You can run chmod a+x ~/.emoji.rb.

I’m happy. I’m gonna keep adding / removing / futzing with my emoji set. The code should work with any number of items in there, so I may go wild. The easiest way to get at them on a Mac is, from any text field, the Edit menu, then Special Characters (tip via classmate Samantha Radocchia’s blog).

If you try this and get it working, let me know on twitter at @maxjacobson #sleaze

EDIT on July 4

Actually this code totally sucks. It’s not at all necessary to use PROMPT_COMMAND. You can change this:

function set_prompt {
  export PS1="[\@] [\W]\n$(~/.emoji.rb) "
}
export PROMPT_COMMAND=set_prompt

to:

export PS1="[\@] [\W]\n\$(~/.emoji.rb) "

The only breakthrough I had is that \$(function_name) runs the function over and over where $(function_name) only runs it once. No idea why.

This fixes the bug where the Terminal wasn’t remembering my current working directory and auto-cd-ing into it when I open a new tab.

It should also be easier to drop this into your current prompt. Just add \$(~/.emoji.rb) wherever in your PS1 you want it.