Category: Ubuntu

configuring powerline-shell for the fish shell

whbeebe

This is going to be a densely packed post. If you don’t know what all this means, then stop reading now.

I use powerline-shell to configure the shell prompt in my fish shell on all my Linux and macOS systems. It provides a colorized view into where I’m at within the file system, which I find very easy to read. In this post I’m showing how the fish shell is set up on my Raspberry Pi 5 running Ubuntu 24.04.1. To start, I have powerline-shell activated in ~/.config/fish/config.fish, like so:

The configuration for the shell prompt (fish_prompt) is lines 7 to 9 inclusive.

At this point you can stop and get on with your life. After using the initial configuration for a bit, I discovered that I needed to trim the number of segments that were shown in the prompt. In order to do this you need to create a JSON configuration file and then edit that. First you need to create a folder for this configuration file under ~/.config named powerline-shell:

What’s in my .config folder

Then you need to create an initial configuration file, like so:

I did the initial generation within the .config folder. These are all the segments, in the order they are displayed within the generated prompt. Of particular interest  to me is the git segment at line 8. When you enter a folder under git control, the prompt will indicate the state of the folder and the files within. I won’t go into any detail, as you can delve into those details at the GitHub location for powerline-shell. You can try it out if you want, and it may be fine for you, because it will give you a quite visual state of git at that location in the file system. The problem I have is how slow it can get with lots and lots of files in a big cloned project. Change directory, or hit return in such a directory, and it can get quite slow to return back to the prompt. So I elected to turn off that feature by deleting the git segment at line 8.

By the way, if you read the GitHub page you’ll discover that powerline-shell supports a number of shells, not just fish.

Links

powerline-shell on GitHub — https://github.com/b-ryan/powerline-shell

system76’s alpha 2 cosmic desktop environment

whbeebe

I re-installed System 76’s Cosmic Desktop Alpha 2 into a virtual machine tonight. I know I was a little harsh about Alpha 1, and accused the system of not properly handling keyboard input. It turns out that the problem was actually with QEMU/KVM itself, because the keyboard input problem affected all the virtual machines I have installed on this system. That problem seems to have mysteriously fixed itself (probably with an update), so that keyboard input is acting normal again.

I’ve managed to install Hack Nerd Fonts and the PowerLine packages for both the bash shell as well as vim. I also grabbed and installed fastfetch from the fastfetch git repo. You’ll note that fastfetch shows the desktop is Cosmic under the Wayland graphics subsystem. The overall Cosmic desktop environment alpha 2 has shown solid improvement over alpha 1. I won’t go over any specifics as there’s already plenty written on this releases new and improved features. Rather this is a personal validation of the glowing praise I’ve read so far. It does live up to the praise it’s receiving right now.

Is it good enough to use as a daily driver? For me, not yet. For anyone else, that’s something they’re going to have to determine on a case-by-case basis. Even if it is an alpha, it’s good enough to begin that consideration for many.