For the last few months I have been using powerline-shell on my macbook at work. I started using this after a failed experiment with ZSH not agreeing with me and I really liked the look of what I have seen on other peoples systems but did not want to deal with ZSH just to have a nice terminal. After working with a few members of my team to get this setup, I have decided to just write it down and point people here.
# Required Repositories First and foremost, you need to clone a few repositories in order to get this to work. .. code-block:: bash
mkdir ~/git_repos
cd ~/git_repos
git clone https://github.com/milkbikis/powerline-shell
git clone https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git
Once these are done you need to install the powerline fonts package. .. code-block:: bash
cd powerline-fonts
./install.sh
Next, go into your terminal configuration and change the font to a powerline font. In iTerm2, the font change is for 'Non-ASCII font' as shown below. [image-iterm-font]
Once this is done, go into powerline-shell's repo and run the installer, followed by linking it to ~/bin.
cd ~/git_repos/powerline-shell/
./install.py
ln -s ~/git_repos/powerline-shell/powerline-shell.py> ~/bin/powerline-shell.py
I link this file to bin so that I can keep all my executables in one area of my home directory and not all over the place.
Finally, add the following to ~/.profile
function _update_ps1() {
PS1="$(~/bin/powerline-shell.py $? 2> /dev/null)"
}
if [ "$TERM" != "linux" ]; then
PROMPT_COMMAND="_update_ps1; $PROMPT_COMMAND
fi
Once this is done, resource your profile.
source ~/.profile