openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 18
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 by Francis Giannaros
Issue #18 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:
- openSUSE Project Releases Major Update to openSUSE Build Service
- Counting down to 11.0 - Get your counter here!
- LugRadio Live (so far)
- Tips and Tricks: Colored shell
- Stephan Kulow: openSUSE 11.0: Package installation 743% faster for default patterns


(17 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)
That PS1 is amazing, can someone break down exactly how it works?
Every color-change, every line-jump has its special ESC-Sequence. You can combine it and get these nice prompts. Look at the links in the article!
have phun !
“The colors - they do nothing!”
Seriously, colors have been around since the early days — /bin/ls was perhaps the first most often used program that did colors.
BTW Novell/SUSE: Color changes are no good — I am still using the LS_COLORS scheme from SUSE 6.x. (Which is in the aaa_base of my repo, suser-jengelh.)
>Little contest: Post your colored shell as comment !
Highly advanced, and also available in aaa_base:
export PS1_XROOT="\[\e[1;30m\]\A \[\e[0;31m\]\h:\$(beautify_path) \[\e[1m\]#\[\e[0m\] “;export PS1_XUSER=”\[\e[1;30m\]\A \[\e[0;32m\]\h:\$(beautify_path) \[\e[1;37m\]>\[\e[0m\] “;
Time — you always need this; hostname — same, or you can accidentally end up deleting a file from the wrong server; and of course a (beautified) path that, if it is overly deep (in expanded form), does not take up the rest of the line!