Nodeship Prompt

Pilot your shell prompt with Node.js.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/nhancox/nodeship-prompt.git
npm ci
npm run build
source adapters/adapter.bash at the end of your Bash config (e.g., .bashrc)

That's it! The Bash adapter will modify your path for you while preserving any existing PROMPT_COMMAND.

If you would like to get rid of the repository and/or organize on your own, copy the binary to a location on your path, remove the lines in the adapter that modify the path (lines 2-10) and then source the adapter (which can be placed wherever you like).

A default configuration is included, but you can customize by creating a nodeship-prompt.json file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME ($HOME/.config when not set).

Build Notes

npm run build creates a binary using the pkg library, allowing for easy distribution while avoiding conflicts with system Node.js versions and version managers. For more information about this choice, read Packaging Choices below.

Current Features

Truecolor support
Plugins:
- User
- Host
- Directory
- Git
- Languages
  - Node.js
  - PHP
  - Python
  - Ruby
  - Rust
- Previous Exit Code

Proposed Plugins

Jobs
Execution time
Date and time

For more development plans, see development-plans.md.

Packaging Choices

nodeship was originally written to run in interpreted form. However, this can make it hard to ensure proper function depending on what version of Node.js a given operating system is currently running.

This was compounded by the initial choice of nodegit for Git operations. It's use of libgit2 required native module installation, which can be unpredictable on some systems.

pkg was then chosen to remove system libraries from the equation, and isomorphic-git picked for easier compilation that results in only a single binary.

I have compared pkg and isomorphic-git versus native Node.js and nodegit, and the pkg version comes out ahead, especially with the choice to shell out to the system's version of Git for otherwise long operations.

Roughly:

Native execution takes 3 times longer than pkg. This is probably because it's a program with very short execution time and Node.js has to "warm up" and compile to bytecode. Example: 200ms versus 70ms.
isomorphic-git takes at least 7 times longer than nodegit, but for simple operations this is a very small difference (around 35ms versus 5ms for simple operations like checkouts). For longer operations like checking status, shelling out is slightly faster than nodegit (and it takes only a modest repo for isomorphic-git to take longer than the entire rest of the program).

Conclusion: sticking with pkg until given a very good reason. Given this is a developer tool, shelling out for significant performance gains is okay, but should not be the first approach.

License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0