Now I have a colourful `bash` prompt

After seeing Adriano Castro’s presentation last week on R3, I was inspired both to play a little bit with R3 itself (cool!), and just as importantly, to finally taking a few minutes to customize my bash prompt. His brightly coloured prompt was full of information and life, mine not; I’d just done an entire presentation on loving the terminal, so this deficit was particularly shameful.

So, I spent a few minutes this evening toying around with things, and ended up with this:

My newly colourful and lively Terminal window.

Ah, lovely; it’s really simple to do for yourself.

Here’s how it works

The terminal prompt is controlled via the PS1 environment variable in bash. You simply need to construct a particular string, and assign it to that variable by adding a line to your .bash_login file like the following:

export PS1="<your formatting string goes here>"

This prompt in particular is:

export PS1="\[\033]2;\u@\h\a[\[\033[37;44;1m\]\t\[\033[0m\]] \[\033[32m\]\w\[\033[0m\] \$ \[\033[0m\]"

This breaks down into:

\[\033]2;\u@\h\a                    #    which writes the `user@host` string
                                    #    into the terminal window's title bar
                
[\[\033[37;44;1m\]\t\[\033[0m\]]    #    which writes (in white-on-blue)
                                    #    `[HH:MM:SS]` at the beginning of
                                    #    each line, so that I know exactly
                                    #    when I executed a command

\[\033[32m\]\w\[\033[0m\]            #    which writes (in a pleasant green) 
                                    #    the current working directory
                                
\$                                    #    which writes "$" if I'm logged in as
                                    #    a normal user, and "#" if I'm logged
                                    #    in as `root`.

To build your own, I’d suggest taking a look at Daniel Robbins’ “Prompt Magic” article on IBM developerWorks. It’s a well put-together article that walks you through the whole, terrifically geeky process.

Update

If you happen to have some strange text-wrapping problems, I might have a solution for you. In a nutshell, end your prompt with a colour code, and use \033 instead of \e. I’ve updated this page accordingly; see “Solving strange text wrapping problems in bash” for more details.

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