I used Skitch for the screenshots:

http://skitch.com/

It’s my favorite of the “easily take a screenshot and annotate it” type apps that have hit the scene recently.

I’m glad you found it useful! I definitely was frustrated when I originally started searching and discovered that most of the info about customizing a bash prompt was difficult both to find and read, hence deciding to publish this article.

Have you had a look at this page:
http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6

That might be a good combination with your tip!

Wolf

This tip applies to other systems besides Macs. Yay!

@Carl: What can I say, I’m definitely a fan of the Mac (and most people who pay attention to me are, too). That’s a pretty cool tip, though, to only echo a divider on commands when you need it. It might be interesting to play around with aliasing the commands themselves that often need to be visually offset and prepending them with an “echo bar” statement.

I definitely was a bit torn over using a multi-line command; my ideal would have been a single-line prompt where the prompt color extended across the whole line (so text I input had the color, too) which would remove the necessity of the dividing bar. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be possible, so I ended up with what I’ve got. Fortunately I don’t use the command line often enough for the signal-to-noise ratio to become annoying yet.

I personally prefer to keep the number of lines my prompt takes up to a minimum, but I do occasionally find your same desire to have some kind of separator show up. Someone in college showed me this command that you can also add to your .bashrc or .bash_profile:

alias bar='echo -e "33[1;37;44m================================================================================33[0m"'

With that, you can create a prominent and colorful bar to mark the start of output, and it makes it nice to see where the command started. Just run "bar;" followed by your command. the semi-colon separates commands. e.g.:

user@host [23:27:42]: ~ > bar; for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo $i; done
================================================================================
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

http://flickr.com/photos/incanus/2474268884/

If you’re curious, the string is:

\[\e[30;1m\]–(\[\e[0m\]\u\[\e[30;1m\]@\[\e[0m\]\H\[\e[30;1m\])–(\[\e[0m\]\j\[\e[30;1m\]|\[\e[0m\]\l\[\e[30;1m\])–(\[\e[0m\]\d\[\e[30;1m\]|\[\e[0m\]\T\[\e[30;1m\])— — -\n\[\e[30;1m\]–(\[\e[0m\]\w\[\e[30;1m\])–(\[\e[0m\]$