{"slug": "ars-asks-share-your-shell-and-show-us-your-tricked-out-terminals", "title": "Ars Asks: Share your shell and show us your tricked-out terminals!", "summary": "The article discusses the enduring relevance of the command line interface, contrasting it with graphical user interfaces by arguing that text-based commands allow users to precisely instruct computers rather than relying on mouse gestures. The author, Lee Hutchinson, describes his personal journey from Windows to macOS in 2007, driven by his growing reliance on the bash shell for work, and notes that he still spends significant time daily using terminal windows across multiple operating systems.", "body_md": "I spend more time today than ever before interacting with terminal windows, which is something I don’t think Past Me would have believed in the early ’90s. Back then, poor MS-DOS was the staid whipping boy of the industry, and at least on the consumer side, graphical environments like Windows (and maybe even odder creatures like AmigaOS) seemed poised to stamp the command line into oblivion, leaving text interfaces behind as we all blasted into the ooey-GUI future.\nAs it turns out, though, the command line is still the best tool for some jobs—many jobs, in fact. I read a wise post some years ago (probably on Slashdot) arguing that a mouse-driven point-and-click interface essentially reduces the user to pointing at something on the screen and grunting, “DO! DO THAT!” at the computer. (The rise of right-click context menus adds the ability for the user to also grunt “MORE THINGS!” but doesn’t otherwise add vocabulary.)\nThe command line, by contrast, gives the user the opportunity to precisely tell the computer what they want done, using words instead of one or two gestalts that the computer must interpret based on context.\nIt sounds kind of silly to say it, but the command line is what finally dragged me off Windows as my daily driver back in 2007. At the time, I’d been forced into regular bash usage at work as I took over the day-to-day administration of Boeing Houston’s fleet of then-brand-new EMC Celerra NSX enterprise NAS appliances, and while there were GUI management options available (I am perhaps triggering trauma in a small subset of older readers by saying the words “EMC Control Center”), the environment I’d inherited was firmly held together by bash scripts.\nAt first, I had turned up my nose at the Linux-ness of it all, but kind of like the fungus in The Last of Us, the shell’s tendrils slowly infected my brain. I began to realize that sad old cmd.exe and MS-DOS batch files really were kind of terrible, and that maybe, just maybe, the Linux-y ravings of my angry graybeard sysadmin mentor were not as crazy as they seemed.\nI didn’t think I’d ever arrive at his method of only running manually compiled Slackware—and, indeed, 20 years on, I’m still not even close—but the guy had a point. The more I used a Unix-y shell at work, the more I began to miss it at home. Windows Vista and its early WDDM woes had reduced my previously badass main PC with two Nvidia 7900GT cards in SLI to a stuttering BSOD-spitting mess, and the future of Microsoft OSes looked bleak—Windows 7 wouldn’t be along to change the situation for years.\nExposure therapy to the bash shell brought me to the tipping point, and I jumped ship to the Macintosh side of the house. It was a move calculated to give me the best of all possible worlds—a good graphical interface with the same bash shell under the hood that I’d come to depend on at work.\nThe before…\nLee Hutchinson\nThe before…\nLee Hutchinson\n…and the after.\nLee Hutchinson\n…and the after.\nLee Hutchinson\nThe before…\nLee Hutchinson\n…and the after.\nLee Hutchinson\nI haven’t looked back. These days, I run three different operating systems at home. MacOS is still my daily driver on the desktop; Windows lives on the gaming PC in the corner; and Linux (in the form of Ubuntu server LTS) is headless in the closet, where it belongs. God is in his heaven, and all is right with my computing world—and still, as with every day since sometime in early 2007, I spend at least an hour or two with a terminal window doing things the old-fashioned, text-y way.\nThe fish shell long ago became my default on my Mac, in no small part because I like fish’s colors and find them helpful (don’t judge me!). When I’m logged into Linux, though, I stick with good old bash. I know zsh and other modern alternatives have their fans, but I’ve found my happy place, and I’m content to stay there.\nBeing a child of the BBS era, when ANSI graphics were the hotness, I have spent about as much time as any other terminal-enjoying admin customizing my environment and making it into a place where I feel comfy working.\n… Oh God, I’m doing it. I’m doing the thing they do on recipe sites where all the reader really wants is directions for making pecan pie but instead gets a giant personal backstory. Forgive me. I’m old. Let’s get to the pie, and by pie, I mean the screenshots and code!\nMy favorite thing: The terminal timer\nIt’s incredibly handy, at least for me, to have an easy-to-see reference of how long the last command took to run. (You don’t need that kind of thing until you need it, and then you often really need it.) To that end, I have some functions living in my .bashrc file that time each command and then append that time—and the last error code emitted—to the next bash prompt. In practice, it looks like this:\nI dig this. Coupled with printing the current time as part of the prompt, it gives you a good idea of not just how long the last few commands took to run but also when you were running them. That’s very handy for absentminded admins (/me raises hand) who leave terminal sessions up for days at a time with important work sitting in them.\nHere’s the code to make this happen, which you should feel free to adapt to your needs. As noted, I keep this in .bashrc as part of my PS1 prompt statement:\ncolor_prompt=yes\nif [ \"$color_prompt\" = yes ]; then\nfunction timer_now_us {\nlocal seconds=${EPOCHREALTIME%.*}\nlocal micros=${EPOCHREALTIME#*.}\nmicros=\"${micros}000000\"\nREPLY=\"${seconds}${micros:0:6}\"\n}\nfunction timer_stop {\nif [[ ${timer_command_active:-0} -ne 1 ]] || [[ -z ${timer_started_at_us:-} ]]; then\ntimer_show=0us\nreturn\nfi\ntimer_now_us\nlocal delta_us=$((REPLY - timer_started_at_us))\nlocal us=$((delta_us % 1000))\nlocal ms=$(((delta_us / 1000) % 1000))\nlocal s=$(((delta_us / 1000000) % 60))\nlocal m=$(((delta_us / 60000000) % 60))\nlocal h=$((delta_us / 3600000000))\n# always show 3 digits of accuracy\nif ((h > 0)); then timer_show=${h}h${m}m\nelif ((m > 0)); then timer_show=${m}m${s}s\nelif ((s >= 10)); then timer_show=${s}.$((ms / 100))s\nelif ((s > 0)); then timer_show=${s}.$(printf %03d $ms)s\nelif ((ms >= 100)); then timer_show=${ms}ms\nelif ((ms > 0)); then timer_show=${ms}.$((us / 100))ms\nelse timer_show=${us}us\nfi\nunset timer_started_at_us\ntimer_command_active=0\n}\n#Prompt and prompt colors\nfunction set_prompt {\nlocal Last_Command=${1:-$?}\nFancyX='\\342\\234\\227'\nCheckmark='\\342\\234\\223'\nexport PS1=\"\\n$WHITE[\\t] \"\nif [[ $Last_Command == 0 ]]; then\nPS1+=\"\\$? $GREEN$Checkmark \"\nelse\nPS1+=\"\\$? $RED$FancyX \"\nfi\ntimer_stop\nPS1+=\"$WHITE($timer_show)\"\nPS1+=\"\\n\\[$HOSTCOLOR\\]\\u@\\h\\[\\033[00m\\]:\\[\\033[1;38;5;027m\\]\\w\\[\\033[00m\\] \\\\$ \"\n}\nfunction timer_prompt_command {\nlocal last_command=${1:-$?}\nset_prompt \"$last_command\"\n}\nPS0='${ timer_now_us; timer_started_at_us=$REPLY; timer_command_active=1; }'\nPROMPT_COMMAND='timer_prompt_command'\nfi\nThis mess of functions will jam all that goodness into your prompt, complete with a fancy green “check” if the program exited with error code 0 or a red “X” and the error code if it exited with something else. The color definitions—$WHITE, $BLUEBOLD, $HOSTCOLOR, and others—are just plain ol’ ANSI escape sequences defined elsewhere in .bashrc and not presented here to try to keep the code excerpts from being too long. You can and should replace them with whatever tickles your fancy.\nThe timer_stop function also has the job of converting the timer into a human-readable format, and it’s probably messier than it needs to be. I’m no developer, though, so this is what Past Lee settled on after a few hours of searching through examples.\nDoing it in fish for folks like me\nThat’s for bash when I’m ssh’d into one of my Linux hosts, but I run fish on MacOS. I have a separate fish function for getting the same results there, complete with gross hacks for turning the measurement into human-readable form. I made this code, and I am unapologetic. Witness my cobbled-together StackOverflow-sourced kludge.\nfunction fish_prompt --description 'Write out the prompt'\n# Save the last status\nset -l last_status $status\n# Calculate the command duration if available\nset -l cmd_duration \"\"\nif set -q CMD_DURATION\n# Convert milliseconds to microseconds for more precise comparison\nset -l duration_us (math \"$CMD_DURATION * 1000\")\n# Calculate different time units\nset -l us (math \"$duration_us % 1000\")\nset -l ms (math \"floor($duration_us / 1000) % 1000\")\nset -l s (math \"floor($duration_us / 1000000) % 60\")\nset -l m (math \"floor($duration_us / 60000000) % 60\")\nset -l h (math \"floor($duration_us / 3600000000)\")\n# Format duration string\nif test $h -gt 0\nset cmd_duration (string join '' \"(\" $h \"h\" $m \"m)\")\nelse if test $m -gt 0\nset cmd_duration (string join '' \"(\" $m \"m\" $s \"s)\")\nelse if test $s -ge 10\nset -l fraction (math \"floor($ms / 100)\")\nset cmd_duration (string join '' \"(\" $s \".\" $fraction \"s)\")\nelse if test $s -gt 0\nset cmd_duration (string join '' \"(\" $s \".\" (printf \"%03d\" $ms) \"s)\")\nelse if test $ms -ge 100\nset cmd_duration (string join '' \"(\" $ms \"ms)\")\nelse if test $ms -gt 0\nset -l fraction (math \"floor($us / 100)\")\nset cmd_duration (string join '' \"(\" $ms \".\" $fraction \"ms)\")\nelse\nset cmd_duration (string join '' \"(\" $us \"us)\")\nend\nend\n# Define unicode symbols for status\nset -l checkmark \"✓\"\nset -l cross \"✗\"\n# Colors\nset -l normal (set_color normal)\nset -l dark_gray (set_color 555555)\nset -l blue (set_color -o blue)\nset -l red (set_color red)\nset -l green (set_color green)\nset -l purple (set_color -o purple)\n# First line\necho # New line\necho -n -s $dark_gray \"[\"(date +%T)\"] $last_status \" # Time in brackets and exit status\n# Status indicator with exit status\nif test $last_status -eq 0\necho -n -s $green $checkmark\nelse\necho -n -s $red $cross\nend\n# Actually echo the duration\necho -n -s $dark_gray \" $cmd_duration\"\n# Do the rest of the prompt\necho\nset -l host_color $purple\necho -n -s $host_color $USER \"@\" (prompt_hostname) $normal \":\" $blue (prompt_pwd) $normal \" \\$ \"\nend\nA splash of color\nSpending my formative years immersed in ANSI BBS graphics has probably made me a little more fond of colorful text in my terminal than the average frumpy, button-downed admin. Look, I know some folks feel that syntax highlighting and colors in general kill comprehension and encourage skimming, but what can I say? I love them and rely on them. Perhaps I skim too much, but so be it. You can take my colorful shell tools from my cold, dead hands.\nTo that end, I lean on a little program called GRC (for Generic Colorizer) to add highlighting and coloration to other tools. It’s broadly available and works without any additional configuration.\nNothing wrong with a little color!\nLee Hutchinson\nNothing wrong with a little color!\nLee Hutchinson\nNothing wrong with a little color!\nLee Hutchinson\nThere’s a bit of aliasing (which I keep in .bash_aliases like a good citizen) to make colorful output the defaults on some common commands:\nalias ls='ls --color=auto'\nalias ll='ls -AlFh --group-directories-first'\nalias df='grc df -h'\nalias du='grc du -h'\nalias free='grc free -h'\nalias ping='grc ping'\nalias traceroute='grc traceroute'\nalias ip='grc ip'\nI’m also a big fan of making my numbers human-readable, and the -h switch is therefore applied liberally.\n(Do note that wrapping commands like ip in GRC can sometimes do weird things if you’re piping its output into something else. Use caution. Or don’t! It’s your computer, knock yourself out!)\nThe terminal itself\nSharp-eyed readers will note from the screenshots that I’m using MacOS’s Terminal.app for my terminal program, despite there being far better options. I suppose the excuse I have is that I’m comfy with Terminal.app and nothing has pulled me off of it. I’ve test-driven the usual suspects—Ghostty, Alacritty, the mighty iTerm2 with its awesome tmux windowing integration, and even fancy new reinterpretations of the terminal experience like Warp.\nBut I just can’t find a reason to switch that sticks with me. Changing terminal applications inevitably means things look different—ANSI colo", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ars-asks-share-your-shell-and-show-us-your-tricked-out-terminals", "canonical_source": "https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/ars-asks-share-your-shell-and-show-us-your-tricked-out-terminals/", "published_at": "2026-05-06 13:32:47+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-22 12:02:27.628037+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools"], "entities": ["Microsoft", "Windows", "MS-DOS", "AmigaOS", "Slashdot", "Boeing", "EMC", "Celerra NSX"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ars-asks-share-your-shell-and-show-us-your-tricked-out-terminals", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ars-asks-share-your-shell-and-show-us-your-tricked-out-terminals.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ars-asks-share-your-shell-and-show-us-your-tricked-out-terminals.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ars-asks-share-your-shell-and-show-us-your-tricked-out-terminals.jsonld"}}