I am getting a garbled prompt when using oh_my_zsh; same with bash_it (prompt is garbled in a different way). I suspect that these shell scripts expect too much bling which the default terminal font is unable to deliver. I am using it mainly from the CLI and am generally happy with the terminal font when used for my main purpose, CLI programming in C (emacs is my editor if it matters), so I am not sure I really want to change it. Interestingly terminal within xfce seems to continue displaying a plain bash (or zsh) prompt with monochrome ls output (root gets color!??)

Have used oh_my_zsh on other systems and have generally been happy with it, though I hate it's auto-correction feature and generally turn it off.

My usual shell is zsh and really want just three things from my prompt:

1. Current path.

2. Git status and branch.

3. Color output from ls.

The rest is just bling and often irritating.

By using these shell scripts I am paying too much in cpu cycles for what I want.

Any suggestions, either with using these scripts or as a separate shell script. I am OK with either zsh or bash.

Thanks.

Unless you're really clever with the environment variables that supply the prompt components (like PS1 and PS2 etc in BASH), you won't be able to get the git status and branch shown in there.

I'd recommend sticking with oh-my-zsh for that reason, and within it, you should be able to achieve your #1 and #3 as well.

#1. According to https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh, it's configured just like ZSH, using a ~/.zshrc and a .zsh file within the oh-my-zsh config and you should be able to manipulate the prompt strings to show the current path, truncated or otherwise.

#2. use the extensions configuration from oh-my-zsh

#3. this is typically done using shell aliases - look up the ZSH way at http://zsh.sourceforge.net/ you would link the shell command 'ls' to the same thing with the options you want, like single column, append characters indicating links or directories, etc.