Zsh Prompt Format With Date/Time and Current Directory

I work with the command line a lot (as do/should most developers, at least if they’re not running Windows). Every once in a while I happen to run a command which takes longer to complete than I expected. When that happens I want to know how long it took/when it started. For this, I formatted my zsh prompt in the following way:

And in plain text:

[2013-10-08 19:09:39] ~/Dev/Projects/orrsella.github.io $

(I’m using iTerm 2 with the “Pastel (Dark Background)” color preset.)

My prompt always contains the current date-time and directory. This helps when you end up with a long-running command you didn’t plan for (an example I had the other day was a jmap heap dump, which took a surprisingly long time). I’d love to also have milliseconds in there, but it seems like zsh is using strftime(3) which doesn’t have anything shorter than seconds.

I also like having the current directory to remember where I am – helpful with many open terminal tabs/windows.

To get this prompt format, edit ~/.zshrc and add the following to it:

PS1=$'\e[0;30m[%D/\%\}/Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}] \e[0;31m%~ $ \e[0m'

Every new zsh instance you start from now on will have the new format. You can easily change the colors/date-time format if you want.