Thread by @jessitron

PowerShell time again.
Today I am customizing my prompt.

For comparison, in Bash, one does this by setting secret codes in a special PS1 variable:

PS1=${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\] \[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$

🤮

In PowerShell, customize the prompt in a function called Prompt. Make it return a string.

I put:

function Prompt { "jessitron > " }

in my $profile and then reload it with:

. $profile

This is pretty clean. I can do what I want in this function, and it can be readable.

To show the current directory, I use
(get-location).path

The parentheses say "execute this and continue with the output."

PowerShell usefully transfers STDOUT and object streams into variables (named or not) in the script.

Parentheses pull the output of a command into use.

exit() return values go separately into $LastExitCode.

But watch out, because you might get one item, and then you can call methods on it; or you might get an array of items, and then you're calling methods on the array.

Here's my prompt so far. If in a repo, it shows the repo directory name, current branch, and then the current path within the repo.

I didn't find a good way to ask the relative path, but removing the start of the string works.