Prettify Your BASH Prompt

Today I talk about how to make your bash prompt pretty and more useful!

👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

===== Follow us 🐧🐧 ======

==== Special Thanks to Our Patrons! ====

==== Referenced ====

==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
2:18 Installation
3:24 The Prompt
3:49 Bashrc Backup
4:36 Oh My Bash Changes
5:04 Themes
7:05 Fonts!
8:23 Plugins
9:52 Completions
11:21 Wrapping Up

#bash #linux #thelinuxcast

[Winnetou]

Matt, I have an idea for a future video or something like that:

THE PROPER WAY challenge!
For a set amount of time or for a project/video/whatever, you have to do all things in the so called the proper way:
- main idea: choose something new for you. And before you start doing it, you READ THE FMANUAL :) If it's feaseable (aka not big), bonus points for going through all of it. Then see if the installing/using that new thing actually works smooth, as intended
- other ideas: whenever you download a package, check its checksum and PGP signature
- any script that you want to run from the internet, download it locally, check in, in its entirety (though, of course, you can skim over commands that look safe, you don't have to understand in detail everything the script does) and only afterwards run it. This script was what bought me this whole idea, when you said in this video that normally we shouldn't, but this time we will (which I think that most of the people go like that in most situations)
- maybe if a bug if found, properly verify it, then check online if it was posted, then do a nice bug report (this might not apply if you don't find something. Also might be a bit tedious)
- if you write a script, make sure you check everything and that you finish all cases, not just make it work for the normal use case
- I'm sure there are other shortcuts that can NOT be taken :)

To be frank, I'm not sure if a video can be squeezed with what I said above. I mean, a video can certainly be made, but I'm not sure if it would be entertaining in any way (or simply not boring). But the idea (sorry for the repeats) would be that if you do these several times or for several days, you can get used to them and actually not think/feel like it's a hassle. And hopefully that can be shown in a video too.

[kojinotfound]

Shall give this a shot on Arch, thank you!

[wyfyj]

Thank you for this Matt! Gonna have to look into this

[linuxdabbler]

Great video as usual Matt. As a zsh user, I personally don't use ohmyzsh, although I have in the past. ohmybash seems like a pretty cool utility, but I would probably use it in the same way that I used ohmyzsh... take inspiration from the prompts, make my own, and save it so it is portable to other machines without installing anything extra.

[keylowmike]

I'll be honest, at one point (probably during college), I though that bash was end-all be-all for the terminal, I didn't know until later on that there were things like zsh or fsh. Cool retro term is my favorite emulator. Great video, Matt!

[thingsiplay]

After Zsh I am back at Bash for a new distro installation and decided to stay at Bash. There are couple of things I miss and cannot be done in Bash. One thing are live autosuggestions while typing. Okay. The other feature is Fish like abbreviations that I used in Zsh. Bash doesn't have it, but at least I could setup a shortcut to expand aliases whenever I want to. I also miss the extended Vi plugin from Zsh, but the basic Vi functionality in Bash is good enough. There are some stuff you can customize yourself in .inputrc and .bashrc to make life better.

Not a friend of Oh my Zsh and friends. But I am never telling others not to use, just don't recommend it. Instead do it manually and don't install too much is my recommendation.
I miss Zsh.

[t.b.s]

Oh-my-bash is good, been using it for a while, that said, the only reason i went back to omzsh is autosuggestion & autocompletion. They make life easier and are quicker to setup. Thanks for the great video & keep'em "Rolling" 💻👍

[ffvbnbvxdvhggb]

This looks cool! Starship is also worth looking at!

[ringo]

Seems like a pretty cool utility. I run starship on my system. It has most of the customizations of powershell but is much more user friendly.

[samoylov]

"All that is not bash is bloated" TL used to say. As for me, use zsh with powerlevel10k. That setup is more customizable than others and got more polished look and feel. But as for scripts. Yeap, they are all in old and trusty BASH!

[JakeLinux]

Or just do it all yourself with no tools needed. In my opinion if you are going to use oh my bash, you may as well just use zsh, but that's just my personal opinion, you use what you want to use, that's the joy of Linux, FREEDOM!!! XD

[nomoremeetings]

I too am lazy and now my bash terminal is looking sharp.

[avalagum]

Does anybody know how to do this without oh-my-bash: if the directory `\w` length is less than some number, the prompt doesn't go to a new line. Otherwise, the prompt goes to a new line.

[isbelmont]

Thank you. why is not the original code of .bashrc in the new .bashrc created by ohmybash?

[jakjustanotherkomment]

Just in case you have set your theme to "random", you can change it in the command-line (without editing any config file) by issuing this command: "source ~/.bashrc"

[anon_y_mousse]

As a long time bash user I find this useful. Anything that looks good that I don't already have I'll have to copy for sure. I would wager that the people complaining about slowdowns just use potatoes, but they could always excise the bits that cause the slowdowns on their potatoes.

[SB-qmwg]

using neovim with a vim alias or vim with spellcheck plugins?

[XGP]

A little warning: I installed OMB on Mint LMDE. Bash immediately crashed. It was impossible to open a terminal the usual way to fix it. It was possible to rename .bashrc in the GUI or do ctrl-alt-f1 to get a terminal without running .bashrc. But be careful.

[capability-snob]

I lived through the early 90s, before software had basic features like theming, and I can't understand why anyone would fetishise that time period. I understand reasonable startup times and pages resident, but outside of electron and the browser there really is no logic in minimalism. I probably won't run all of OMB (as I don't want things that interfere with the gnu readline experience and I think powerline is uuuugly) but I'm going to see what I can steal.

[phrtao]

Back on KDE Plasma ? That is a really old version (even for Debian !) - 5.20 originally came out in October 2020.