How to improve your Mac’s terminal part 2 - the prompt
April 18, 2015
My prompt remained largely unchanged for a long time until I came across
this article written by the excellent Mark Otto (of Twitter bootstrap fame).
In the article he provides a code snippet for your .bash_profile to turn your
standard prompt into this:
I loved it and started using it myself straight away. Unfortunately there were a few issues with it. The prompt would fragment or completely disappear when cycling up or down through my command history and I encountered horrible line wrapping issues.
The issues were mostly resolved in a later article and solved entirely by this lovely gist. The follow up included code that would change the colour of your working git branch depending on its status.
This seemingly insignificant feature is incredibly useful. I’m constantly reminded to commit my work, resulting in frequent, small commits rather than behemoths where I’ve completely forgotten when, why and what code I’ve changed.
I coloured the prompt with the help of this wonderful article by Michael Plotke and the colour value table on the Solarized site. Here is a basic but handy script I made for displaying the colours. (the value need for Terminal is the XTERM column)
#!/bin/bash
#
# generates an 8 bit color table (256 colors) showing the colors used by
# Ethan Schnoover's Solarized theme
printf "\nSWATCH SOLARIZED HEX 16/8 TERMCOL XTERM/HEX L*A*B RGB HSB "
printf "\n------ --------- ------- ---- ------- ----------- ---------- ----------- -----------"
printf "\n\033[48;5;234m \033[m base03 #002b36 8/4 brblack 234 #1c1c1c 15 -12 -12 0 43 54 193 100 21"
printf "\n\033[48;5;235m \033[m base02 #073642 0/4 black 235 #262626 20 -12 -12 7 54 66 192 90 26"
printf "\n\033[48;5;240m \033[m base01 #586e75 10/7 brgreen 240 #585858 45 -07 -07 88 110 117 194 25 46"
printf "\n\033[48;5;241m \033[m base00 #657b83 11/7 bryellow 241 #626262 50 -07 -07 101 123 131 195 23 51"
printf "\n\033[48;5;244m \033[m base0 #839496 12/6 brblue 244 #808080 60 -06 -03 131 148 150 186 13 59"
printf "\n\033[48;5;245m \033[m base1 #93a1a1 14/4 brcyan 245 #8a8a8a 65 -05 -02 147 161 161 180 9 63"
printf "\n\033[48;5;254m \033[m base2 #eee8d5 7/7 white 254 #e4e4e4 92 -00 10 238 232 213 44 11 93"
printf "\n\033[48;5;230m \033[m base3 #fdf6e3 15/7 brwhite 230 #ffffd7 97 00 10 253 246 227 44 10 99"
printf "\n\033[48;5;136m \033[m yellow #b58900 3/3 yellow 136 #af8700 60 10 65 181 137 0 45 100 71"
printf "\n\033[48;5;166m \033[m orange #cb4b16 9/3 brred 166 #d75f00 50 50 55 203 75 22 18 89 80"
printf "\n\033[48;5;160m \033[m red #dc322f 1/1 red 160 #d70000 50 65 45 220 50 47 1 79 86"
printf "\n\033[48;5;125m \033[m magenta #d33682 5/5 magenta 125 #af005f 50 65 -05 211 54 130 331 74 83"
printf "\n\033[48;5;61m \033[m violet #6c71c4 13/5 brmagenta 61 #5f5faf 50 15 -45 108 113 196 237 45 77"
printf "\n\033[48;5;33m \033[m blue #268bd2 4/4 blue 33 #0087ff 55 -10 -45 38 139 210 205 82 82"
printf "\n\033[48;5;37m \033[m cyan #2aa198 6/6 cyan 37 #00afaf 60 -35 -05 42 161 152 175 74 63"
printf "\n\033[48;5;64m \033[m green #859900 2/2 green 64 #5f8700 60 -20 65 133 153 0 68 100 60"
printf "\n"I was feeling pretty happy with myself at this point; the colourscheme was great, the font was inviting and my bash prompt looked cool and was actually useful to me.