Longship

Makes your command line prompt more informative without being intrusive.

Simply replace your current PS1 with the path to the longship executable. No need for any elevated privileges. Aims to improve your prompt without interfering with any other plugin or tool you have installed for your terminal by just altering the PS1. So you can still use all your desired command completions and all other features you modified your shell with without any changes.

Installation

Install rust and cargo

Run cargo build --release to create a binary of the program.

Example

🛰 [USER.11]~/Code/rust_projects/longship/src 🌿master ⚡ 0.13.0  🦀1.82.0  🐿️go1.23.4  🐍3.13.0 python_venv ✔/x3s
»

If in a directory which is in $HOME a ~ will be displayed instead.

If the current working directory is a symlink a 🔗 will be displayed after the file path. This relies on the shell exposing the PWD variable. Otherwise it will show the working directory as followed from the symlink.

If rust 🦀, go 🐿️, zig ⚡ or python 🐍 files are present in the current directory they will be indicated with an indicating emoji and the version of the compiler/ interpreter.

If a python virtual environment is active its name will be displayed even when there are no python files.

If it is a remote session it is indicated with the user name, the last part of the IP address in front of the path and a satellite emoji 🛰.

If in a directory where in its or the parent path a .git/HEAD file is present the name of the branch will be displayed as well as the herb emoji 🌿.

If your previous command ran longer than 2 seconds the command execution time will be shown at the end of the prompt with second precission. If the command exited successful, it will be indicated in green including a leading check mark ✔, otherwise in red with a leading cross x.

Configuration

zsh

PS1=$'$(/path/to/longship)'

bash

PS1='$(/path/to/longship)'

In order to be able to see the command execution time and whether it succseeded or not you need to expose the environment variables LONGSHIP_TIME_STAMP and LONGSHIP_RET_CODE. The first one needs to be created just before a command is run and the second one just after a command is run. This can be done via adding the following to your .bashrc or .zshrc.

zsh

# This will run before any command is executed.
preexec() {
    LONGSHIP_TIME_STAMP=$(date +%s)
    export LONGSHIP_TIME_STAMP
}

# This will run after the execution of the previous full command line.
precmd() {
    LONGSHIP_RET_CODE=$?
    export LONGSHIP_RET_CODE
    PREV_CMD=$BUFFER
}
# So no time is displayed on an empty command
zle-line-finish() {
    if [[ -z "$PREV_CMD" ]]; then
        unset LONGSHIP_TIME_STAMP
    fi
}

bash source

# This will run before any command is executed.
function PreCommand() {
  if [ -z "$AT_PROMPT" ]; then
    return
  fi
  unset AT_PROMPT
  LONGSHIP_TIME_STAMP=$(date +%s)
  export LONGSHIP_TIME_STAMP

}
trap "PreCommand" DEBUG

# This will run after the execution of the previous full command line.
FIRST_PROMPT=1
function PostCommand() {
  export LONGSHIP_RET_CODE=$?
  AT_PROMPT=1
  if [ -n "$FIRST_PROMPT" ]; then
    unset FIRST_PROMPT
    return
  fi
}
PROMPT_COMMAND="PostCommand"

Inspiration

This is heavily inspired by starship which is a much more powerful and versatile prompt but needs to be used with eval.