Given how much time I spend in a terminal, typing things and hitting enter, I think it’s a good idea to keep the vibe in my shell nice. For the first like seven years of my coding career, I felt it was important that I design and maintain my own prompt. There’s evidence of this on my blog and in my dotfiles repo:
- In December 2012, when I used this character
ϡ(???) - In June 2013, when I used a little Ruby script to make it print a random emoji each time
- In June 2015, when I wrote a shell script to display some git information about the current repository
- In June 2016, when I kept the random emoji, but rewrote the script in Rust
- In December 2017, when I finally got rid of the emoji, because I was using Linux at work and couldn’t figure out how to display emoji in my terminal emulator
- In January 2019, when I rewrote the git shell script in Rust, which I thought would make it faster, but actually made it slower, but by then I was too stubborn and just kept it
On some level, I felt like my shell prompt was an avenue for self expression. I took some pride in that. No offense if you don’t care about yours, it’s not a judgment thing. I’m just trying to establish some stakes here.
I found myself annoyed by how long my prompt took to render, especially when working in large git repositories. I spent some time optimizing it. I disabled some of the functionality; for example, I updated the prompt to display my current git branch, but ripped out the “dirty checking” which changes the color of the branch when there are uncommitted changes. I missed that functionality and brought it back.
Eventually, just as an idea, I decided to see what was out there. I googled around a little bit, and found sindresorhus/pure, which bills itself as a “Pretty, minimal and fast ZSH prompt”. That’s basically what I want.
I installed it a few months ago, and… well, shit. It’s very good.
Here are a few things that are great about it.
When your last command failed, the prompt turns red.
When your last command took a while, the prompt automatically displays how long it took.
You don’t need to have the thought “hm, that felt slow, was that slow? Should I re-run it with time?”
The prompt tells you when your branch is behind the remote, and you should might want to pull. That means it automatically fetches, so that it can know that. At first that seemed kind of crazy, that rendering my prompt would have side effects on my repository (“How dare you, prompt?” was my gut reaction), but I’ve come to really appreciate it. It’s the best kind of automation, in that it becomes just one less thing I need to worry about. That requires building some trust, but it did.
It renders super fast because it does a lot of its work asynchronously, like checking the git status. It uses this script called mafredri/zsh-async to do that. The effect is pretty novel: the prompt renders right away, and then (sometimes) it changes a half second later. It’s a lot like an asynchronous request in a website, which fetches data and displays it when it’s ready. I skimmed the readme of that repo and I have no idea how the hell it works, but I basically don’t care, I’m happy to let it be some magic.
There’s only one thing that I miss from my days of customization. Before I used pure, my prompt looked like:
hardscrabble.net main*
All on one line. The first bit is the name of the folder. Then the name of the branch – printed in red, and with an asterisk, to indicate that there are uncommitted changes.
Imagine that you were at that prompt, and then you ran cd _posts.
What should it display then?
It would be pretty intuitive if it displayed this:
_posts main*
In my days of customization, though, my prompt would have displayed:
hardscrabble.net/_posts main*
The idea being that I wanted to know two pieces of information:
- what repo am I in?
- what path am I at, in that repo?
To achieve that, I needed to write some clumsy, but workable Rust.
By contrast, pure displays the absolute path to the working directory:
~/src/gh/maxjacobson/hardscrabble.net/_posts main*
❯
Which is…fine.
In summary, be like me: get over yourself and use pure.