powerline-rs

powerline-rs is a rewrite of powerline-shell, inspired by powerline-go.

Note: powerline-rs is in somewhat of a maintenance mode. I'll try to make time to fix bugs and add new features, but the code is messy and I will not be fixing it any time soon unfortunately. It could be reworked to be more generic and maybe read a config file for the prompt, since it's still going to be very fast thanks to rust. But I'm not going to implement that. Not now, at least.

That said, I still use this for my own prompt and will probably never stop, so don't worry it's definitely not a dead project.

Why?

Speed! I haven't done any extensive benchmarks, but it appears like even the debug version of powerline-rs is about 20 milliseconds faster than powerline-go. The Rust language is perfect for fast applications, since copying large structures isn't implicit.

How to install

cargo install powerline-rs

It's also available on Nix and the AUR (not officially maintained).

In order to use optional features, add something like --features "feature1,feature2,etc" to the end of the command.
To disable default features, add --no-default-features (and manually readd features you want to keep).

Optional features:

• flame (Not recommended for production; adds benchmarks)

Default features:

• chrono (Time support for --shell bare)
• git2 (Git support)
• users (Username support)

Then add the following code to your shell:
Bash
Fish
Zsh

What's new?

Well, the default modules have changed to not include the username and hostname. I feel like most people already know that. But you can always enable it, of course!

What's optimized?

• Generally just using Rust.
• Using libgit2 over calling and parsing git output (Thanks tbodt for suggesting it!)
• libgit2 can be disabled at compile time if you don't plan on using git functionality.
• Themes are using a simple small key=value scripts. No JSON overhead or similar.
• The output of powerline-rs is slightly smaller than the 2 alternatives I mentioned. To be honest, I have no idea why.

What's removed?

Most of the service-specific modules are deleted. I am very lazy.
Pull requests are welcome, though.

Also, the jobs module won't work with --shell bare.

Add it to your shell

Bash

prompt() {
    PS1="$(powerline-rs --shell bash $?)"
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=prompt

Zsh

prompt() {
    PS1="$(powerline-rs --shell zsh $?)"
}
precmd_functions+=(prompt)

Fish

function fish_prompt
    powerline-rs --shell bare $status
end

Ion

We can't display the success status because ion now forbids the use $? from functions as a bi-product of the new namespacing system. This will of course eventually be resolved.

fn PROMPT
    powerline-rs --shell bare
end