Development Prompt

Posted: 2017-09-10 11:16:00 by Alasdair Keyes

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I've been looking at a way to streamline my development recently, and I picked up on a couple of problems that I was facing.

• Git branch tracking - Remembering my current branch and the changes that are outstanding
• Previous command status - The output from some commands doesn't always make clear if there's been a problem. Typing echo $? afterwards to check the exit status started becoming tedious

I knocked up the following changes to my BASH prompt to help me tackle this.

My prompt now has he following field for previous status.

alasdair@machine (OK) ~ $ 

OK shows that the last command exited with 0

alasdair@machine (OK) ~ $ sdgsdfgsdfhsdfh
sdgsdfgsdfhsdfh: command not found
alasdair@machine (127) ~ $ 

On error the status will be shown instead

In addition, when I'm in a git repository, an extra field is added showing the following

(reponame.git[branch]-<TRACKED_FILE_CHANGES>:<UNTRACKED_FILES>)

In reality, this looks like so

alasdair@machine (OK) (myrepo.git[master]-1:3) ~/myrepo $

I can see that on the master branch I have 1 modified file and 3 untracked files.

The code to achieve this is in the following gist https://gitlab.com/snippets/1731310 - Just add to your .bashrc, .bash_profile or whichever file you use to control such things.

If you modify this, make sure that the last_command_status() function is called first, otherwise you'll get incorrect return values being picked up.

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