I’ve been with vanilla Terminal and bash for forever now. I had a brief stint with zsh, but even the extremely slight load delay was too much for me. So I turned to customizing my trusty old bash shell.

? is a value-storing entity. Referencing it with $? yields the exit status of the last-executed command! I thought it’d be fun to use it to power whimsical bash prompt.

I ended up deciding on the table-flipping dude. He would sit there, calmly next to his table. At the first sight of an error, he’d flip it. Then, if I corrected my ways, he’d set the table back down. If I made 2 or more errors in a row, he’d go into super-angry mode. To accomplish this, I’d keep track of two variables, curErr and lastErr, updating them according to $?. Here’s the meat of it:

bash
[[ $? = 0 ]] && curErr='' || curErr='1'
if [[ $curErr && $lastErr ]]; then # Two consecutive errors
  table=$'(╯ಠ益ಠ)╯彡┻━┻'
elif [[ $curErr ]]; then # One error
  table=$'(╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻ '
elif [[ $lastErr ]]; then # One success
  table=$' ┬──┬ ﾉ(°—°ﾉ)'
else # Two consecutive successes
  table=$'( °—°)   ┬──┬'
fi
lastErr=$curErr

And the results:

All in all, a pretty fun addition to my routine. ◼