Re: Pimp your shell - Debian developer tips?
On 5/27/20 9:06 PM, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Do we have Debian devs here who have pimped their shell heavily with custom
> prompts, colors, command line fonts, shell window title hacks, perhaps
> using zsh etc? Have you written blogs about you experiences, can you share
> some good reads (with screenshots) of what you have done?
>
> I've read a bit on zsh and powerline and the like, but I am annoyed that
> all those blog posts are quite superficial and do not mention security,
> interoperability or performance aspects. Frankly any blog post that
> recommends cloning random repos or even worse, running wget | sh something
> gives me chills.
>
> Some above average posts are
> https://linuxhint.com/install_zsh_shell_ubuntu_1804/ and
> https://www.hildeberto.com/2018/02/oh-my-zsh.html
>
> I'd very much want to read about some more knowledgeable experiences.
>
>
> Tips?
>
>
> Some might react that bells and whistles is useless and real unix beards
> only run plain bash, but I think that good text prompts have a potential to
> increase productivity. And anyway I don't want those MacOS users to claim
> that their shells would be in any way better than what I can have in Debian
> ;)
>
That's an interesting topic.
In general I am pretty happy with this config:
https://salsa.debian.org/mestia/debbuildenv
It uses screen + zsh and color themes are adjusted for a bright terminal.
I use screen on the primary console on my work workstation and ssh from it to
all other machines which usually have plain bash.
If I need a session for something more advanced I start screen with the same
config on the remote machine, but keep separate terminal window, so I don't get
the nested screens from the "primary" screen terminal.
oh-my-zsh looks too heavvy for me.
The main reason to use zsh in the setup above is the screen's status line. I
didn't manage to customize it good enough with bash.
Best,
Alex
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