Switching to a Zsh Shell

I spend a lot of time on the command line, and personally find having that much info in my prompt <i>incredibly</i> distracting. I would really prefer to leave things like battery monitoring to my OS or Window Manager - not my shell prompt. The screenshots in this article look like the kind of stuff that you do when you're just starting with a new piece of technology and you want to use every single feature just to play around. Cool and fun, but at the end of the day perhaps not very useful.

Steve is using Oh My Zsh, which is one of my pet projects. You can find it on Github.<p><a href="http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh</a>

I like having extra information in my prompt, but not to the point that it takes up a whole line of its own. Here's what mine looks like: <a href="http://grab.by/26hX" rel="nofollow">http://grab.by/26hX</a>

To be honest, most of that stuff works just fine in BASH too.<p><a href="http://gist.github.com/277975" rel="nofollow">http://gist.github.com/277975</a><p>That's my bash prompt, doing the same. Except, it doesn't factor in mercurial repositories, but that'll be a breeze to add.<p>Displaying: (&#60;virtual_env&#62;) user@host [ &#60;folder&#62; ~&#60;branch&#62; &#60;* available changes&#62;]$

There's a more general solution for putting VCS information in your zsh prompt called vcs_info. I don't know if it covers all the features of these hg and git prompts, but it does support svn and cvs (among others), which I still have to use for some projects.<p><a href="http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.html#SEC273" rel="nofollow">http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht...</a>

For a good zsh configuration have a look at <a href="http://grml.org/zsh/" rel="nofollow">http://grml.org/zsh/</a> (vcs_dir enabled prompt, persistend dir stack, directory based profile and many more)<p>For a general zsh overview have a look at <a href="http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html" rel="nofollow">http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html</a>