I’m back to zsh after several months using Fish. I took this as an opportunity to update my default configuration, remove any plugin manager and pre-configured prompt or theme (e.g., oh-my-zsh). I started with Thorsten Ball’s configuration, and updated it to my liking. More importantly, I decided to split the configuration into different pieces (one for the prompt, one for the aliases, etc.), in addition to the core .zshrc, and to follow XDG guidelines (everything goes into ~/.config). My prompt now only includes the path, a Git indicator and a λ, whose color is updated depending on the result of the last command (red if the last command returned an error, i.e. $? ≠ 0) or the existence of pending jobs (yellow if there are suspended or sleeping jobs).¹

local dir_info_color="%B"
local dir_info="%{$dir_info_color%}%(5~|%-1~/.../%2~|%4~)%{$reset_color%}"
local promptnormal="%(?.%{$fg_bold[green]%}.%{$fg_bold[red]%})λ %{$reset_color%}"
local promptjobs="%(?.%{$fg_bold[yellow]%}.%{$fg_bold[red]%})λ %{$reset_color%}"

PROMPT='${dir_info}$(git_prompt_info) %(1j.$promptjobs.$promptnormal)'

With quarantine and all., I had to strengthen my “work from home” setup. I have a remote access to the computers at my lab, and I wanted to customize my terminal a bit. In my case, this is iTerm2 but this should apply to any terminal. What I really wanted was to add some useful information to my prompt, without adding too much of a mess on the existing one. It is worth noting the following only makes use of the right prompt. With many (pseudo-)terminals arranged in panes or in separate windows, it often becomes hard to remember which ones are connected via ssh. Here is what I have in my zsh config file for managing the right prompt:

function preexec() {
timer=${timer:-$SECONDS}
}

_is_ssh() {
[[ -n ${SSH_CONNECTION-}${SSH_CLIENT-}${SSH_TTY-} ]]
}

function precmd() {
if _is_ssh || (( EUID == 0 )); then
    remote="@${(%):-%m}"
else
    remote=""
fi
if [ $timer ]; then
    toc=$(($SECONDS - $timer))
    if [ ${toc} -ge 5 ]; then
      export RPROMPT="%F{cyan}${toc}s %F{blue}${remote}% {$reset_color%}"
    else
      export RPROMPT="%F{blue}${remote} %{$reset_color%}"
    fi
    unset timer
fi
}

The above code ensures that the execution time of long commands (i.e., which took more than 5 seconds) is displayed in the right prompt, together with the short name of the server into which I ssh’ed when this is the case. Now, I hope I will never forget (again) that I’m on a remote server and not on my local computer when I cp or rm stuff in the home directory.

As a last note, while I am happy with iTerm on my Macbook I use Tmux on remote servers, mostly for portability, to facilitate window navigation, and to ensure that I can restore my shell at any time when I reconnect to the server later. First, in zsh, I added a short function that checks whether there are any existing Tmux sessions. (This is entirely borrowed from James Seward.)

if [[ -z $TMUX ]]; then
    sessions=$( tmux ls 2> /dev/null | awk '! /attached/ { sub(":", "", $1); print $1; }' | xargs echo )
    if [[ ! -z $sessions ]]; then
        echo "⚠ Available tmux session(s): \033[34m$sessions\033[0m"
    fi
    unset sessions
fi

Second, my Tmux config file itself is quite limited and I do not use any external plugin, again for portability issues. However, I updated the status line a bit:

set -g status-style fg=white,bg=black
set -g status-interval 5
set -g window-status-format "#[fg=colour8]○ #W "
set -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=colour4]● #W "
set -g window-status-current-style bg=black,fg=white
set -g window-status-activity-style bg=black,fg=yellow
set -g window-status-separator ""
set -g status-justify left
set -g status-right "#[fg=yellow]♯#S #[fg=white]| #[fg=blue]#(whoami)#[fg=white] on #h"
set -g status-left ""

This way, I have a list of the active and inactive windows (on the left), the name of the session, the user and the server name (on the right).