Shortening my prompt in Zsh

Question

I\'m having a lot of trouble getting zsh to shorten my prompt. I\'m currently using zsh with the agnoster theme and oh-my-zsh package manager.

My prompt currently gets a

Answer 1

Old question, I know, but as an alternative solution I just discovered powerlevel9k, an extension of agnoster (they appear practically identical bar a fair few tweaks), which has this functionality built in.

Just set it as your zsh theme, then in .zshrc set

POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_DIR_LENGTH=2

which ensures that only two directories are listed.

Alternate options are outlined in the readme.

Answer 2

In the Zsh themes folder you should search for this file agnoster.zsh-theme , open with an editor and change this piece of code :

prompt_dir() {
    prompt_segment blue $CURRENT_FG ' %~ '
}

with this :

prompt_dir() {
  prompt_segment blue $CURRENT_FG "%c"
}

This will prompt the current directory instead of the full path.

Answer 3

add this to ~/.zshrc

prompt_dir() {
  prompt_segment blue $CURRENT_FG '%2~'
}

Explanatory note: %<N>~ will limit the number of path segments leading up to the current directory to N. I.e. %2~ will show only two last segments: the current directory and its parent directory.

Answer 4

First you would have to copy the theme into a different one in order to customize it to your liking.

• Copy agnoster.zsh-theme to e.g. mytheme.zsh-theme and select it in your .zshrc
• Then modify the theme to your liking

I looked at the agnoster theme and found a place where you could save space.

prompt_dir() {
    prompt_segment blue $CURRENT_FG ' %~ '
}

could be changed to

prompt_dir() {
    prompt_segment blue $CURRENT_FG ' %25<...<%~%<< '
}

This will truncate your path to 25 characters and replacing more with ... How this works is described in the zsh manual (linked below).

Short explanation is:

• %25<...< will truncate everything that is longer than 25 characters to ...
• %<< will basically tell zsh that anything after this should not be truncated (limiting the truncation to the path part)

I leave it to you to find more places where you can save space by.

And for more customization needs take a look at zsh: 13 Prompt Expansion