Megaprompt

A heroic Zsh prompt from the year 20XX.

Screenshots

These screenshots are out of date, but I haven't wanted to bother updating them. For example, they don't show styling in the PWD display of git repo root or mount point, and they don't reflect some of the default styles.

Features

• maximal information
• directory coloring based on permissions/ownership
• directory styling to show git repo roots (default bold)
• directory styling to show mount points (default reverse video)
• shows git/hg branch name if in repo
• shows current keymap indicator (I suggest replacing vi-ins with emacs, then you get the best of both worlds)
• shows exit status if non-zero
• shows number of jobs if non-zero
• shows time (useful when you want to know when you ran an old command)
• shows history number (useful for history expansion)
• shows user/host
• configure which of these are displayed

Configuration

• MEGAPROMPT_STYLES is an associative array of styles to color codes or strings for different parts
• MEGAPROMPT_KEYMAP_IND is an associative array of keymap names to their indicators
• MEGAPROMPT_PRE_FUNCTION is the name of a function to call to generate a prefix to the prompt. This allows you to add something custom before the start of the prompt.
• MEGAPROMPT_DISPLAY_P is an associative array of display pieces to "true" or "false"
  • git_dirty do you want to be informed when your git repo is dirty? (note: this may be slow)
  • git_untracked do you want to be informed when your git repo is has untracked files?
  • git_ahead_behind do you want to be informed when your git repo ahead or behind of its tracking branch?
  • time do you want the time of the command? (Yes -- it's useful later when you want to know when you ran something)
  • username do you want to see your username? (I recommend setting it to false for your normal username, true otherwise)
  • host do you want to see your hostname? (I recommend setting it to false unless $SSH_CLIENT or $TMUX is set)
  • tty do you want to see what tty you're on?
  • histnum do you want to see what history number you're on? (useful for history expansion)
  • hrule do you want a horizontal line to go to the end of the line to visually delimit output from different commands?
  • truncate do you want to truncate the top line if it is longer than your terminal? (this also happens if hrule is on)
  • branch_style_regex do you want to match branch styles using regex (requires zsh to be compiled with PCRE support)?
  • pwd_mount do you want to have mount points highlighted in the directory display?
• MEGAPROMPT_GIT_STYLES is an an associative array of regexes to colors for git branch names

These arrays are defined at the top of the source, so just look at it to see what fields exist on the ones I haven't documented. There are a lot of fields.

Depends

You must load zsh-hooks before this plugin.

Install

I recommend using zgen. Here is how to do it with zgen:

zgen load willghatch/zsh-hooks
zgen load willghatch/zsh-megaprompt

Otherwise, just source the .zsh files

Issues

• This was written primarily for zsh version 5. With version 4.3.17 it works fine except that the keymap indicator doesn't initialize properly until after the first command or keymap change.
• The hrule option (MEGAPROMPT_DISPLAY_P[hrule]=true) and the truncate option don't work well below zsh version 5.0.7 -- they are truncated a little too early and therefore don't span the whole line like they are supposed to.
• The PCRE module is required for git branch coloring. As far as I know all distributions include it.

Why

I have occasionally updated this prompt because I use it. Why not use something like Starship instead? Most people will probably prefer something like Starship. But Megaprompt predated Starship, and at the time I wrote it I didn't like any of the alternatives I saw. Moreover, Megaprompt still has some features that I have yet to see on other prompts, such as styling the PWD display to show extra information (eg. ownership, permissions, mount points, and git repo roots). I like these features, so I keep using (and even on rare occasions updating) this prompt.

Future Work

I would like to split my prompt into:

1. static information about the previous command, with maximal information. This should include the date and time the process ended, its run time, exit status, etc.
2. dynamic information while composing a new command. This section should update to, for example, show an indicator of the current input state (keymap), the current time, current git data, etc. I'm not certain how updates should be handled -- I don't want constant updating of prompts that I won't look at for hours. But I find it mildly grating when I go back to a shell session that has a prompt that has become out of date (eg. with respect to git status). It should also only show information that I care about while composing a new command.
3. static information about the new command. This should replace the dynamic information at the time that the command is run. It likely should show much more information than the dynamic prompt. For example, it should show the date and time that the command was run, so I can easily tell how long a program has been running. There is a notable problem with typical prompts showing the time that you can typically tell either when a command was run, or (more likely) when the previous command finished. I want to be able to see both of these when I look at historical data in a shell session.

Parts 1 and 3 should potentially be shown together, which either requires some duplication or fancy terminal integration (of questionable wisdom) to edit historical prompts or (possibly wiser) that has a different paradigm than just showing ANSI code output from commands. But I find that it is not infrequent that I want more historical data when I look at shell prompts, especially when I'm coming back to a shell session that I left idle, especially one that I left on a remote machine (eg. a tmux session that I disconnected from but am coming back to, potentially days later).