Color shell prompt for available colors

I wanted to make my command line shell prompt to be more noticeable and nicer with some color. I wanted to take advantage of 256 colors when available, but fall back to a simpler color scheme when only 8 colors are available, and to no colors if none are available.

The tput colors command will return a numeric value that can then be used in conditions. So, basically, I set the prompt, and then wrap it in a color set based on the condition that matches that number of colors.

Since I have configuration for bash, fish, and zsh all in my dotfiles, I had to figure out how to do this for all three, which each do things a little differently.

For the three shells:

Bash

In bash, you set the special PS1 variable to the value you want the prompt to contain. It has special escape characters that can get replaced with variable values each time the prompt is rendered.

We use tput setab with a color number to set the background, and tput setaf for the foreground. These color numbers are from a special set. I found a nice chart to list them all and choose. I wanted a green, and a nice one happened to be the number 42, so I went with that for the 256 color set.

PS1="[\u:\W]>"
tputColors="$(tput colors 2> /dev/null || echo 2)"
if [ $tputColors -gt 2 ]; then
    if [ $tputColors -gt 8 ]; then
        tputFG="\[$(tput setab 42)$(tput setaf 0)\]"
    else
        tputFG="\[$(tput setab 2)$(tput setaf 7)\]"
    fi
    tputReset="\[$(tput sgr0)\]"
    PS1="${tputFG}${PS1}${tputReset}"
fi
export PS1="$PS1 "

Fish

Fish has its own syntax and you put the prompt into the special fish_prompt function that gets run each time the prompt is rendered. It has a nice set_color method where named colors or hex values can be used. The -b option sets the background.

function fish_prompt
    set tputColors (tput colors 2> /dev/null; or echo 2)
    if test "$tputColors" -gt 8
        set_color black -b 00d787
    else if test "$tputColors" -gt 2
        set_color white -b green
    end
    echo -n '['
    echo -n -s "$USER"
    echo -n ':'
    echo -n (basename $PWD)
    echo -n ']>'
    set_color normal
    echo -n ' '
end

Zsh

Zsh is similar to bash, except zsh has a special syntax for grabbing any of the standard 8 color palette by name, and its own escape characters for the prompt variable values.

autoload -U colors && colors
PS1="[%n:%1d]>"
tputColors="$(tput colors 2> /dev/null || echo 2)"
if [ $tputColors -gt 2 ]; then
    if [ $tputColors -gt 8 ]; then
        tputFG="%{$(tput setab 42)$(tput setaf 0)%}"
    else
        tputFG="%{$bg[green]%}%{$fg[white]%}"
    fi
    tputReset="%{$reset_color%}"
    PS1="${tputFG}${PS1}${tputReset}"
fi
export PS1="$PS1 "

Result

My prompt text is pretty simple, looking like [user:directory]>. In actual use, this looks like:

or:

or: