My PS1 implementation, documented

.bashrc

# ...
# User specific aliases and functions

export VCP_PREFIX="{ "
export VCP_NAME="{symbol}"  # You can use "value" or "symbol" here
export VCP_BRANCH="{blue}{value}{reset}"
export VCP_OPERATION="{red}{value}{reset}"
export VCP_BEHIND="↓{value}"
export VCP_AHEAD="↑{value}"
export VCP_SEPARATOR="|"
export VCP_STAGED="{blue}✚{value}"  # +
export VCP_CONFLICT="{red}✖︎{value}"  # ×
export VCP_CHANGED="{yellow}↻{value}"  #
export VCP_UNTRACKED="{magenta}…{value}"
export VCP_CLEAN="{green}✔︎"  # ✓
export VCP_SUFFIX="{reset} }"
export PS1='[\u@\h:\w $(vcprompt)] \$ '

ps1.md

more better ps1

Take a little time to make yourself a better PS1 experience in bash. There are lots of PS1 variations out in the wild, but I wanted something:

• Fast. All the Python implementations slow bash to a crawl. That's terrible. Bash should be fast.
• Broad. Most PS1 implementations cater for one or maybe two VCS variants. I use them all. I need something that works for them all.
• Useful. I need to see at least the branch, current revison and mod state. I'd prefer to also get some counts (unstaged, modded, deleted, etc).
• Colourful. Almost everybody wants this. And everybody can have it. You just have to be methodical when escaping your colour change drectives. Eg: you can get a pale blue with $(tput setaf 153), but you should wrap it like this: \[$(tput setaf 153)\] to avoid early line wraps in the terminal window. Use this colour chart to pick colors that work for you.

VCPrompt is the best I have found so far. It's lightweight and blazingly fast, because it's written in c. It's open source too, so if I ever pull my thumb out, I could implement the counts I want.

update 2021-08-24

there is still a chaotic assortment of vcprompt and ps1 implementations on the wild-wild-web but rust-vcprompt outshines them all. no need to mess around with anything else.

vcprompt-install.sh

cargo install --root=$HOME/.local vcprompt