prezto

I like to tinker with my working environment. I like to check out alternate window managers, new shells, launchers, editors, etc. Most of the time it’s something to do that requires a little bit of brainpower, but is mostly mindless. It’s kinda nice to screw around with stuff without any real goal other than learning something new.

I had been using Robby Russel’s excellent zsh environment Oh my zsh for about a year. After running into the myriad of dotfiles projects on gitHub I decided to give it a shot and roll my own. So I poked around to see if there were alternatives to OMZ, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because I like to tinker. I ran into prezto and really liked it. Prezto appears to have started as a reaction to OMZ’s kitchen sink approach. It’s very well organized, fairly few modules, and only an handful of themes. It has excellent out of the box autocomplete (hosts out of known-hosts for ssh, the autocomplete is nicely categorized, etc). Solid OSX support (the macports module and gnu modules work very well together), and is pretty quick overall.

I ported and extended a theme I wrote for OMZ to prezto. You can grab it from here, and I issued a pull request to the main repoitory. The prompt should show everything you’d need to know about what’s going on with your git repository.