Blue Cog Blog

A little Saturday morning tweaking.

Based on this post at railstips.org, I decided to adjust my Bash prompt by appending the following to my ~/.bashrc file:

#...

function parse_git_branch {
  ref=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return
  echo "("${ref#refs/heads/}")"
}

BLACK="[33[0;30m]"
BLUE="[33[0;34m]"
VIOLET="[33[1;35m]"
CYAN="[33[0;36m]"

PS1="n[$CYANu@h:$BLUEw$VIOLET $(parse_git_branch)$BLACK]n$ "

The prompt will now show the name of the branch I am working in when the current directory is part of a Git repository. The original code used yellow, red, and green to highlight parts of the prompt. That messed with my mind when I ran RSpec and saw yellow and red when I was expecting all green. Rather than get used to it, I changed the colors. I also added some newlines to perhaps keep the command line neater when deep in a directory tree.

[Update 2010-07-23]

After running with the above settings for a while I decided I don’t care for the colors in the prompt. Don’t need the square brackets either. I do like seeing the current git branch. That simplifies things a bit.

#...

function parse_git_branch {
  ref=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return
  echo "("${ref#refs/heads/}")"
}

PS1="nu@h:w  $(parse_git_branch)n$ "

[Update 2010-09-25]

Okay, maybe a little color…

#...

function parse_git_branch {
  ref=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return
  echo "("${ref#refs/heads/}")"
}

VIOLET="[33[1;35m]"
NO_COLOR="[33[0;0m]"  

PS1="n$VIOLETu@h:w  $(parse_git_branch)$NO_COLORn$ "

See. I told you it was "tweaking."