Thursday, December 19, 2019

Informative Shell Prompts

Recently, /u/NotSoButFarOtherwise wrote about Starship, a cross-shell prompt generator:
If you really forget your current directory, username, or host, there are commands to remind you. But you'd probably be surprised how often you don't.
I tried it, but I immediately noticed, I like having the context available in the shell history.  If I get interrupted and jump directories a couple of times to run a few brief commands, I rely on my prompt from a few lines or a few screens back to remind me of what I was doing.

Multi-tasking isn’t ideal, yet remains inescapable, so I don’t want to strip away all of my assistive configurations.  It reminds me a lot of my experience with returning to vim after using VS Code for 1-3 months: “You know what, having more information was actually rather useful.”