x9ps1-git

Inspired by - but improves upon - the tide prompt for fish shell.

But for good 'ol regular bash terminals...

• Which is a bonus if you prefer Bash over Fish as a syntax and language.
• Fish's suggestion/auto-completion functionality is admittedly really cool - though the ble project for Bash is arguably nearly as good if not better (taste-dependent).

Table of contents

• Overview
• Feature comparison
• Screenshots
• Other notes
• Installation

Overview

The tide prompt for fish shell is fantastic for working with git on the command-line. The prompt tells you what branch your on, and if there are uncommitted changes.

x9ps1-git takes tide's idea a bit further - but for bash.

Feature comparison

Feature	Fish+tide?	x9ps1-git?
Doesn't show git info if not in a repo directory	✔	✔
Shows active repo		✔
Shows active branch	✔	✔
Shows if merge needed	✔	✔
Shows if push needed		✔
Shows time of last prompt/status update		✔
Compresses path display (a pro and a con)	✔
Has a cool, memorable name	✔
Easy to customize prompt¹		✔

Footnotes ¹ Script includes defined color macros and defined prompt primitives.

Screenshots

• Not in a github repo directory

  

• In a (any) github repo directory

  

Other notes

• If the terminal is not currently in a git repository folder, the prompt looks similar to most stock prompts. But if it is in a git folder, it expands to two lines in order to include all of the information.

• The program is a fairly small bash script can be easily edited - to add, remove, and/or reorganize the prompt.

• Colors can be assigned to individual elements.

• The hostname element is already nested in the analogue to a switch or case block, so that the hostname can be colored differently depending on the name. (In case this script is synced across multiple hosts.)

• Want multiple configurations? Make multiple copies of the script, and edit each one.

  • Note: This concept could be expanded - probably without too much effort - to make x9ps1-git an immutable base script, that other much simpler "flavor" scripts source.

Installation

If installing to a user folder rather than system-wide, don't prepend sudo to commands.

## Download to any directory in $PATH (/usr/local/sbin in this example)
cd /usr/local/sbin
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jim-collier/x9ps1-git/main/bin/x9ps1-git
sudo chmod +x x9ps1-git

## Apply to current terminal prompt
source x9ps1-git
PROMPT_COMMAND='fX9ps1Git_SetPs1'

## Add both lines to your personal .bashrc so that all terminals get the prompt
echo -e "\nsource x9ps1-git\nPROMPT_COMMAND='fX9ps1Git_SetPs1'\n" | tee -a ~/.bashrc

Sourcing it only defines a few fX9ps1Git_* functions. Outside a git working tree the prompt starts no process at all, and inside one it runs git twice.

The older one-liner, PROMPT_COMMAND='PS1=`x9ps1-git`', still works. It starts a new bash for every prompt though.