I use plain old bash with the plain old .bashrc that ships with Debian. I’ll bolt on a git-branch-aware function into the prompt here and there, but that’s about it.

Why? I ssh into a few dozen machines most days and my shitty little lizard brain can’t deal with everything being different on each box. So as much as I appreciate zsh, powerline plug-ins, all that glitzy stuff, I’ll be a late adopter when it comes to plain old Debian stable…

Yes, I use starship with nushell.

Fish, with Starship. It does everything I need it to, completely unmodified. In comparison, zsh barely reached feature parity with a dozen plugins, and I just don’t want to spend my time on that

I use fish + tide

I tried zsh+p10k before fish+tide, but zsh felt annoying in subtle ways that weren’t fixable with (existing) plugins, so I switched back to fish, but installed tide to mimic my previous p10k theme.

I use Zsh with the Oh My Zsh! framework, and I use a different theme depending on which subuserland I’m in, by customising ~/.zshrc. For example, I use the gentoo theme on Debian and its derivatives, agnoster on NixOS, darkblood on Arch, strug for Mageia, apple on my macOS device, aussiegeek on FreeBSD, and gallifrey on OpenBSD. Different themes helps me remember which package manager to use and which distro-specific commands will work.

I’ll send some screenshots in a bit, when I boot up my PC.

I like Zsh because of its tab completion and command history. I also quite like its plugins.

Before anyone asks, I have tried Fish before, and I prefer Zsh. I have tried configuring Bash before, and I prefer Zsh. I have played with Ksh and Tcsh on BSD, and I prefer Zsh. I used PowerShell a long time ago, and I prefer Zsh.

I’m on the boring side…

PS1="% "

I like it though, it gives me more room for commands !

I designed this prompt shortly after I switched to Linux, I’ve been using it for a while, it has a few features like putting the exit code if it isn’t 0, changing the hostname color if its detected that you are over ssh, changing the directory color to red if it isn’t writeable, changing the prompt color to red if your euid is 0, and instead of printing I have no name! when your user does not have an entry in the passwd file, it will just print your uid in red. I also have a version that I wrote in C that works the same way with a subsitution shell, but it was harder to sync across all my devices when I made a change, so I rewrote it in posix shell that could be synced with just my .bashrc and work almost anywhere.

I don’t know how to post a screenshot, sorry for the long paragraph, but here is the source code, feel free to share or do whatever with it!

#-----PS1-----#
BOLDRED="\001\033[1;31m\002"
BOLDBLUE="\001\033[1;34m\002"
BOLDPURPLE="\001\033[1;35m\002"
BOLDCYAN="\001\033[1;36m\002"
BOLDGREEN="\001\033[1;32m\002"
COLORRESET="\001\033[0m\002"
CURSOR_BLINK="\001\033[5 q\002"
INFO_COLOR=$BOLDGREEN
SUPERUSER_COLOR=$BOLDRED
NORMALUSER_COLOR=$BOLDCYAN
SSH_COLOR=$BOLDPURPLE
__shellprompt ()
{
        if [ "$(id -u)" = 0 ]; then
                PROMPT_COLOR=$SUPERUSER_COLOR
                PROMPT_EMBLEM='#'
        else
                PROMPT_COLOR=$NORMALUSER_COLOR
                PROMPT_EMBLEM='$'
        fi
        # [user@hostname]
        printf "%b%s%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR}[${INFO_COLOR}" "$(whoami 2>/dev/null || (printf "%b%s" "${BOLDRED}" "UID:$(id -u)"))" "${PROMPT_COLOR}@"
        if [ -n "${SSH_TTY}" ] || [ -n "${SSH_CLIENT}" ]; then
                printf "%b" "$SSH_COLOR"
        else
                printf "%b" "$INFO_COLOR"
        fi
        printf "%s%b" "$(hostname)" "${PROMPT_COLOR}]"
        # :
        printf "%b" "${COLORRESET}:"
        # (/pwd)
        printf "%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR}("
        if [ -w "$PWD" ]; then
                printf "%b" "${INFO_COLOR}"
        else
                printf "%b" "${BOLDRED}"
        fi
        if [ -n "$HOME" ] && [ "$HOME" != "/" ] && { [ "$PWD" = "$HOME" ] || [ "$PWD" != "${PWD#"$HOME/"}" ]; }; then
                printf "%s" "~${PWD#"$HOME"}"
        else
                printf "%s" "${PWD}"
        fi
        printf "%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR})${COLORRESET}"
        # :(EXITCODE)
        if [ "$1" != 0 ]; then
                printf "%b" "${COLORRESET}:"
                printf "%b%s%b" "${PROMPT_COLOR}(${BOLDRED}" "${1}" "${PROMPT_COLOR})${COLORRESET}"
        fi
        # ->$
        # ->#
        printf "%b" "\n${PROMPT_COLOR}->${PROMPT_EMBLEM} ${COLORRESET}${CURSOR_BLINK}"
}
export PS1='$(__shellprompt $?)'
#-----PS1-----#

I just use the default fish without any modifications.

To be fair, I don’t use the terminal that often.

Even for my homeserver, I access most stuff (containers, updates, etc.) graphically with CasaOS (a web interface), and as a more “casual” PC user, I work with the tools given by my DE. I don’t do much fancy stuff.

And when I really need the CLI, fish is alright for me. It’s simple, has sane defaults, and feels (thanks to the automatically activated spell check and completion) very efficient for me.

Bash isn’t bad, but feels a bit lackluster. Zsh may be better, but requires too much configuration for what it’s worth for me.

I’ve been using zsh for some time, but I finally switched to fish. I also checked out Nushell, it lacks some features, but it’s really interesting. On zsh I was using Powerlevel10k, on Fish I used oh-my-fish with the shellder theme before I switched to Starship. I’m very happy with this setup. My prompt looks like this:

My Terminal Emulator of choice is kitty, the font is Monocraft.

I tried oh-my-bash with some fancy theme, but went back to plain old bash from my distro since suggestions for autocomplete had suddenly started to lag. Went back to default and it’s as quick as ever to suggest.

I’m not willing to trade efficiency for bells and whistles

I’m old school, I use Bash and do the basic " [user@hostname working-directory]$ " but there’s a newline before the first bracket so there’s always a line break and an indent after STDOUT so I can tell where the command output ends if it’s huge. I also tend to colorize it a bit.

I’ve tried ZSH and I like it, but as a Linux System Engineering overseeing thousands of servers, they all use Bash, so that’s what I’ve stuck with as well.

I edited my PS1 variable

Vanilla zsh prompt. I had a thing that told me which git branch I was on for a while but my editor tells me that so I decided I didn’t need it

As I use bash basically for everything, I wanted my prompt to be as basic as possible (No newlines, fixed format) and compatible across my PC, Laptop as well as server and Pi via SSH.
Therefore, it’s a simple __prompt_command function in my .bashrc (nearly) everywhere.
It’s structured as:

1. Terminal/TTY number in orange
2. Username in green (for roots .bashrc it’s red)
3. Hostname in green
4. Current working dir in blue
5. Current git branch in yellow (if in a git repo)
6. Exit code in red (if not 0)

Looks like this:

I used some prompt generator to get the variables and colors right, and then wrapped parts in if-then where needed.
The result is:

__prompt_command() {
    local EXIT="$?"
    PS1="\[\033[38;5;216m\](\l)\[$(tput sgr0)\] \[$(tput sgr0)\]\[\033[38;5;85m\]\u@\H\[$(tput sgr0)\]:\[$(tput sgr0)\]\[\033[38;5;68m\][\w\[$(tput sgr0)\]"
    local GIT_BRANCH="$(git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/')"
    if ! [[ -z "$GIT_BRANCH" ]]; then
        PS1+=":\[$(tput sgr0)\]\[\033[38;5;142m\]${GIT_BRANCH}\[$(tput sgr0)\]"
    fi
    PS1+="\[\033[38;5;68m\]]\[$(tput sgr0)\]"
    if [ $EXIT != 0 ]; then
        PS1+=":\[$(tput sgr0)\]\[\033[38;5;1m\]${EXIT}\[$(tput sgr0)\]"
    fi
    PS1+="\\$ \[$(tput sgr0)\]"
}

In practice I use every aspect of it. The terminal number is useful for sorting, the username is needed especially when handling e.g. git or db servers with specific users, and one has a terminal as the user, one as root and one as normal user. Hostname is obviously important with multiple ssh sessions open all the time (especially without terminal emulator titles). Typing pwd all the time would be very tedious, as I only move around my system in bash, so having it in the prompt is nice. If I am in a git repo I also need to know the branch and otherwise it’s not displayed anyway. Quickly identifying silently failed commands is tedious, especially because issuing one command overwrites $? again, so ‘logging’ it if necessary is nice.

I customize the shell prompt in the PS1 variable. Its unpleasant to work with that unreadable language, but I do that once for years and I reuse it across distros.