Extend Bash and Zsh Prompt with Liquid Prompt

Productivity Sauce

The default Bash or Zsh prompt isn't exactly a hub of useful information, but you can change that by deploying Liquid prompt. Once enabled, Liquid prompt turns the humble prompt into a dashboard capable of displaying all sorts of data: from processor load and battery status to current time and the key info of the current Git repo. Better still, Liquid prompt is easy to install and requires no tweaking or complicated configuration. Provided Git is installed on your system, clone the project's GitHub repository to your home directory using the git clone https://github.com/nojhan/liquidprompt.git command, then add the source ~/liquidprompt/liquidprompt line to the ~/.bashrc file. Use then the cp ~/liquidprompt/liquidpromptrc-dist ~/.config/liquidpromptrc command to copy the configuration file, and open it in a text editor. Enable and configure the available options at will.

Keep in mind that Liquid prompt relies on other Linux utilities to obtain specific information. For example, it uses the acpi tool to poll the battery status and lm-sensors package to read temperature data. So if you want to display this info, you need to install the required packages.

Once you've configured Liquid prompt to your liking, launch the terminal and behold the new prompt with all the useful info. Liquid prompt uses color codes and icons to present information, and you might want to take a look at the descriptions of various options on the project's website to better understand how to interpret them.