In Fedora the bash prompt is not colored or highlighted by default.
I personally find this a usability issue: it makes it hard to find previous
commands between long outputs when scrolling back in a terminal. Of course
in my own host I have a custom prompt, but it means whenever I am using a
different Fedora/Centos/RHEL system or vm, the prompt is not highlighted by
default, which I miss.
Since I spent a little time thinking about and investigating this I thought
I would write to start a discussion here.
I noticed that Ubuntu has a bold green and blue prompt and NixOS has a
green one by default, though not Archlinux or OpenSuSE I think.
I think it would be nice to have a distinctive prompt by default, or at
least a very easy way to get one permanently (ie in a single command: even
if that were `dnf install bash-color-prompt` or running say `colorprompt`
once).
For example I could suggest we change the default fedora bash prompt from:
PS1="[\u@\h \W]\\$ "
to something like:
PS1="\[\e[\${PROMPT_COLOR}m\][\u@\h \W]\[\e[0m\]\\$ ".
Then the PROMPT_COLOR envvar would make it easy for users to change or
customize their prompt coloring anyway.
For example with PROMPT_COLOR="1;32" one gets a bold green prompt, which
seems readable in both dark or light terminals.
What do people think overall? Are there other pros and cons of a color
prompt?
Any better ideas or direction?
Jens