Hi Jens,
Jens-Ulrik Petersen <petersen(a)redhat.com> writes:
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?
I think your suggestion is very unobtrusive and a great quality of life
improvement! So please go for it!
My only suggestion would be to double check with someone who's familiar
with accessibility with respect to color blindness to find the best
possible default, so that color blind users will not have an even harder
time spotting the prompt.
Cheers,
Dan