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Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

Wow, am I the only person who prefers a shell prompt of just "$ "?

I have a bunch of abbreviations for common git commands, though, so I guess it balances out.

You're not- I can't stand waiting 3-5 seconds every time I hit enter, just so I can have a more verbose prompt that tells me things I already knew.

The one I wrote, for Bash, uses SIGALRM (via the Time::HiRes perl module) to time out after half a second: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/git-situational-awareness

It would be cool to do the opposite as well, don't start checking the fancy vcs stuff until 1/2 second after the prompt is loaded.

Agreed. I don't think Bash allows async function execution, though.

It seems a lot simpler to just type "git br" (or, heck, "gb") when I care. Usually I have a good reason for being in a particular branch, though I tend to check before doing merging anyway.

When I want to fiddle with minor configuration details, hey, bash and zsh users have nothing on emacs. ;)

This seems to be a large difference in people's work flows. Some of us like to remember things like what branch we're in, the file system structure of our project so we can edit in vim without needing NERDtree or some other IDE that organizes stuff, we like to know our libraries so we don't need auto-completion, and then there's the opposite people. For myself, I think the remember-for-me tools have their place, and I'm a fan of Flex's Flash Builder IDE even though I use vim for everything else, so I won't begrudge someone for choosing not to remember something. That's what doc is for.

On the other hand, in this case I frequently just use 'git status' which reports my branch anyway among other info I want to double-check just in case I somehow forgot, and this is really just a neat shell trick rather than being really useful, like the one that prints a green ':)' when the last command succeeded and a red ':(' when it failed...

I like knowing what branch I'm in without having to do a "git br".

Nope, me too. I can see maybe using a prompt like this temporarily, or putting this info in an XTerm's title, but I spend most of my time on the command line and really don't want crap like this distracting me.

My prompt on localhost is always "$ " or "# ", but I add user and host on remote machines to avoid making any big mistakes on the servers I manage.

Come to think of it, I do actually keep that info around, I just put it in the status line* in tmux or dwm, rather than cluttering my shell prompt with it. I guess that's a different post, though!

* Mine currently says:

    3.1 pra |  0:ksh  1:top  2:ksh  4:ksh- 5:w3m*                                                        |   . 1.45, 1.57, 1.01 . 2010-10-07 23:07

which has system load, time, battery (on laptops), etc. "pra" = "pranaferox", my desktop. (I usually have a lot more shells open than that, but I turned everything off while installing a new light in the ceiling earlier.)

You just might be. ;-)

I have git status in my prompt but also use short shell aliases. If anyone's curious:

http://github.com/samsonjs/config/blob/master/zsh/zshrc#L230...

I like a timestamp so that I know:

(1) How long the last command took (approx, as there's time between the prompt showing and me putting in a command)

(2) How long ago I ran the last command in a given shell window

When I care about the former (and I often do), I just prefix it with time. "time make bench" etc. The real / user / system break down is more meaningful than just wall clock time.

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