UX: Colorize the Shell

[Gill-Bates]

The Bash looks pretty boring. I would love to highligt the Path in Bash

nano ~/.bashrc

# Colorize Shell
PS1='\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;31m\]@\[\033[1;32m\]\h:\[\033[1;35m\]\w\[\033[1;31m\]\$\[\033[0m\] '

Now, much better 👍

Can't you make this default?

[Joulinar]

Hi,

many thanks for your request. Honestly I'm not sure if everybody like to have such a colourful command line as it is quite specific 😉

[MichaIng]

On some images, where the default /etc/skel/.bashrc is installed for root (which differs from default /root/.bashrc installed by debootstrap or Debian installer) the prompt is green. Yeah I guess that is pretty much a question of taste and a the console/terminal one uses. Not all of them support (all) colours and on a serial console you would see the raw colour codes, which is really distracting, especially with a large amount of different colours like in your example. I started to remove colours from our script outputs in some cases, but still need to find a way to reliably identify a serial console or directly colour code support.

I can imagine to add this in a way together with this: #2651
So basically allow to define a set of colour codes which are then read by DietPi-Globals and used to colourise several console outputs in a consistent way. So who uses a serial console only, or one with limited colour code support, can easily disable those at a single place for all outputs that we can control.

I personally leave the command prompt without colour but add those to the ls command to quickly identify file types, UNIX permissions, existence of symlink targets etc, so this might be somehow included as well:

# Colorize "ls" command
eval "$(dircolors)"
alias ls='ls -A --color=auto'
alias l='ls -lh'
alias ll='l -L'

+ shortcuts for ls list view + showing dot files by default 😉

What you can see is that I instead add timestamps to the PS1 so that I can track how long a long-running command took or when I executed what, with certain limitation as the timestamp in from of a command is actually the one from when the previous command ended 😄. So yeah pretty much possibilities and about personal taste/use-case and we should be careful to not overload it as while we make ones happy we make other ones unhappy.