Bash Customisation

Projects like Starship offer a lot of customisations to the shell prompt. Highly intelligent and efficient individuals who have a lot of work to do often waste a lot of time customising their shell prompts, terminals, themes, etc. Does the time spent in customisation really payoff in higher productivity?

It's preferable to have a consistent, minimal, distraction free UI which is easy to setup and works across multiple computers.

The Go Lang code formatter go fmt philosophy embodies the idea that consistent code formatting is more important than user specific choices.

Considering this approach, here's a simple bash prompt customisation:

# Add this to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc
# Draw horizontal line with current time between commands
PS1='\[\033[01;34m\]$(printf "%.s─" $(seq 3)) [\D{%H:%M:%S}] $(printf "%.s─" $(seq $(expr $COLUMNS - 15)))\n'$PS1

Works on Debian/Ubuntu with Bash version 5.x (earlier versions may also work) and seq from the coreutils package.

Shortcuts

# Add this to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc
# Bash functions for frequently used command sequences
sd() { cd "$@" && clear && ls -alFh; }