Simple Bash Prompt (SBP) is a bash prompt, which was simple once. This started out as a pure ripoff from powerline-shell, which is great, but written in python. SBP is all bash, which makes it fast and fun.

I've tried making the code as readable and extensible as possible. If something seems wrong, lacking or bad in some way; feel free to rant, review and create a pull request.

For a live demo of this magic head over here

I wanted to add support for trueculors instead of relying on "just" 256 colors. To do this I had to break the configuration, and when the flood gates had been opened, a lot of things started changing. Suddenly layout changes was pretty easy too.

If you want the fancy pointy segment separators, you need the powerline fonts installed and enabled. Both. You can get them here. Then run the install.sh script. Now the hard_to_remember part. Change the settings of your terminal emulator. Something like "Settings" and then "Fonts" will probably be the right place. If you don't like powerline then use the 'plain' theme or create your own.

There is an install script. It will copy the default settings to ~/.config/sbp/settings.conf along with the default color assignments to ~/.config/sbp/colors.conf and add two lines to your $HOME/.bashrc:

  sbp_path=/the/path/to/sbp/
  source ${sbp_path}/sbp.bash

So you're ready to go. Now you do nothing. Just use it. But you could. If you want. Change stuff up a bit. Edit your config by running sbp config and run sbp reload if you changed something substantial. Most changes will be effective immediately. You can use the sbp command for a lot of things:

  sbp
  Usage: sbp [command]

  Commands:
  segments  - List all available segments
  hooks     - List all available hooks
  peekaboo  - Toggle visibility of [segment] or [hook]
  color     - Set [color] for the current session
  layout    - Set [layout] for the current session
  themes    - List all available color themes and layouts
  reload    - Reload SBP and user settings
  debug     - Toggle debug mode
  status    - Show the current configuration
  config    - Opens the config in $EDITOR

Segments can be configured, moved, and hidden depending on your mood, or environment. Read more about those and how to make your own in the Segments Folder.

Hooks let's you execute scripts asynchronously to either alert you, populate data for segments or whatever you want really. Read more about those and how to make your own in the Hooks Folder.

Themes let you decide how the prompt is drawn, both in terms of layout and the colors used. Read more about those and how to make your own in the Themes Folder. SBP supports both truecolors through RGB values and 256 colors by using ansi codes.

The setting settings_prompt_ready_vi_mode=1 will use the prompt_ready icon with the configured colors and change it's color depending on the current VI mode if enabled. The cursor will also change from blinking to solid block if your terminal supports it.

I've been comparing the speed of SBP to fancy prompts like powerline9k, but there has been an improvement recently in the form of powerlevel10k. The latter version feels a lot snappier and does deliver on speed. However in my benchmarks SBP is still faster. I ran 50 invocation of the prompt in succession, with the following enabled for all prompts: host, path, git, time, last command time and last command exit status. I measured the display time on my trusted old mac mini running Ubuntu using the following function:

precmd() {
  export second=$(date +'%s%3N')

  if [[ -n "$first" ]]; then
    echo $(( first - second ))ms >> ${HOME}/${ZSH_THEME##*/}.stats
  fi
  export first=$(date +'%s%3N')
}

Since bash doesn't support the precmd function I used $PROMPT_COMMAND instead, and by taking the average of each stats file and ignoring the first unrealistic values I ended up with pretty similar results.

I'm not quite sure why these numbers differ so much from the ones in the Powerlevel10k readme, but I suspect it might be because the benchmarking script used doesn't actually measure rendering but rather generation time. Another point of course is the different hardware used, which will affect the time spent but shouldn't affect the relation between the times much. There will also be a ton of other things that will slow each prompt down differently depending on implementation. SBP for instance caches data to files which can be slower on some systems like the rpi. Also feel free to educate me if there are better ways of measuring the speed difference here. On a related note though, on thing that tends to slow these prompts down are large git repositories. Powerlevel10k has a special binary for this and I expect it will perform much better in these cases. But in the end, even if SBP is faster on some setups, the consistency in speed for Powerlevel10k is mind blowing. I'll have to dig into how they've done that.

Yes, but actually no. At the time of writing there are 4 sed invocations in addition to a few date calls. I want to get rid of awk and sed, but I haven't been able to yet.

You are using a terminal that doesn't support truecolors. You can write your own ansi theme, or use one of the two provided ones, default-256 & xresources. The latter only uses the 16 base colors.

Why yes! Simply use the 'plain' layout. No fonts needed.