My Shell Setup
- Published on:
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- Process 11
- Current music:
- Mammal Hands —
Sleeping Bear
- Current drink:
- Infusion of hibiscus, apples, rosehip, and orange peels, with cherry flavor.
Occasionally, I set up new devices/environments, and there I want to use the same shell setup that I use elsewhere. This post is so I could just copy things from it instead of looking into the ./zshrc on my other devices.
Long time ago, for quite some time, my setup was using forked Mathias Bynens’ dotfiles with a bunch of stuff.
But it felt like a lot, and at some point I moved to Oh My Zsh (created by Robby Russell, maintained by Marc Cornellà and Carlo Sala).
For a few months, I used the default theme there, but at some point wanted to find something better.
What I did is set ZSH_THEME="random" in my ~/.zshrc, then restarted the terminal a few times until I got to one that felt nice, stayed on it for a bit, then when I found something I did not like, switched to random again, and so on. Here is omyzsh wiki entry on Themes from which I got the info on how to use the random theme.
In the end, I stopped my search when trying the refined theme by Kasper Isager Dalsgarð that is based on the “Pure” zsh prompt by Sindre Sorhus and which also credits Julien Nicoulaud’s nicoulaj theme for some inspirations.
The reasons why I decided to choose it:
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I wanted to have the prompt itself on a separate line from the current location and all the metadata, so visually it always starts in the same place and creates pseudo-“headers” in a way.
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It should reflect git status, but not take too long — I struggled with performance of some other themes, especially on bigger monorepo setups.
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After you run a command, it should output how long it took. The
refinedomits the output for when commands run quickly, but for anything longer it outputs the total time, which can be very helpful in debugging CLI perf.
So, ZSH_THEME="refined" it is.
Here is how it looks like when I am in my blog repo on the main branch:
kizu-blog main*
❯The one config adjustment in the ~/.zshrc that I did to this theme is this:
# Override the refined theme to remove “git:” prefix
zstyle ':vcs_info:*:*' formats "$FX[bold]%r$FX[no-bold]/%S" "%b" "%%u%c"That’s basically overriding the same line that is defined in this theme and removing the %s: part (which stands for version control — I am only using git, I have no need to mentioning anything else here).
That’s it! That’s the setup! I think I might have some git aliases and stuff, but I will save them for the future… Or maybe just update this post once I have time.