Liquid Prompt: power bash & zsh prompt

We explored several power prompts and bars for bash and vim earlier. However, Liquid Prompt deserves a special mention due to the information it shows and flexibility of customization. It takes power prompts to next level from bashstyle-ng by bringing extensive system information right at the prompt. Liquid Prompt is a script that works with bash and zsh.

Features

• The usual – custom prefix, user, host, PWD
• Numerical or analog clock
• Current battery status and remaining life (acpi should be installed to fetch battery status)
• Average CPU load over a threshold, with intensity colour map
• Temperature of system sensors (lm-sensors should be installed)
• Number of screen or tmux detached sessions
• Number of attached sleeping jobs (using Ctrl-z) and running jobs (started with &)
• Indication for screen or tmux session
• X11 support indicator
• SSH or telnet connection indicator
• Integration with several version control systems Git, Mercurial, Subversion, Bazaar, or Fossil
• Current branch status
• and lot more…

Frankly, as soon as you start sing liquid prompt you’ll be amazed.

However, this processing comes at a cost of additional time and resource to show the prompt and might lead to unresponsive behaviour on slower connections.

Installation

Get the source from GitHub and source the shell script:

$ git clone https://github.com/nojhan/liquidprompt 
$ source ./liquidprompt/liquidprompt

You can add the second line to your ~/.bashrc to enable Liquid Prompt permanently.

Usage

Some of the options are configurable using a config file. Copy the sample config from source first:

$ cp ./liquidprompt/liquidpromptrc-dist ~/.liquidpromptrc

Some configurable options are:

• LP_BATTERY_THRESHOLD: threshold value under which the battery level is displayed (default 75).
• LP_LOAD_THRESHOLD: threshold value over which the load average is displayed (default 60).
• LP_PERCENTS_ALWAYS: display the percentages of load/batteries along with their corresponding marks or just coloured marks.
• LP_RUNTIME_THRESHOLD: minimum value after which the runtime is displayed
• LP_PATH_LENGTH: the maximum percentage of the screen width used to display the path. The default is 35%.
• LP_HOSTNAME_ALWAYS: always displaying the hostname or showing it only when connected with a remote shell (the default).
• LP_USER_ALWAYS: choose between always displaying the user (the default) or showing it only when he is different from the logged one.
• LP_DISABLED_VCS_PATH: set to a list of absolute and : to disable VCS integration. Some users reported performance issues with large svn or git projects).
• There are several other variables to disable certain integrations.