Add a Dash of Color to the Terminal with Powerline-Like Prompt

Dmitri Popov

Productivity Sauce

Jul 22, 2016 GMT
Dmitri Popov

The terminal's default color scheme is uninspiring at best. Obviously, this is done on purpose, as colorful embellishments can be distracting. But adding just enough color to the terminal can liven it up a bit as well as offer useful clues when you are working from the command line. Earlier I wrote about the Liquid Prompt tool that adds a wealth of useful information to the command line prompt. But if all you want is to add a bit of color to the prompt, paste the content of this Gist into the ~/.bashrc file (remove the archey word at the end of the Gist). Open then the terminal, and you should see the prompt in all its colorful beauty.

By default, the code uses a special character as a path separator. If this doesn't work with your preferred terminal font, you can simply remove the separator character. To do this, open the bashrc file in a text editor and set the value of the separator variable to empty as follows: separator=''. That's all there is to it.

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