Lightning bolt for prompt (PS1)

Question

I've seen on a few screencasts a while back where someone had a lightning bolt instead of $ on the bash prompt.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

This page explains how to set your bash promt. As @ulidtko says, you can use ⚡ as one example of a lightning bolt symbol. To set this, use:

export PS1=⚡

You will, however, lose everything else in the prompt you had before (not just the $). What you had before depends on your distribution. On my Ubuntu 10.10 setup it's \[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ by default, which you can get by running echo $PS1. To use mine as an example, to just change the $ to a ⚡, run:

export PS1="\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w⚡ "

To make this change across all bash shells, add the above line to your ~/.bashrc file.

The result is like this:

marcog@minime:~⚡ echo hello world
hello world

Answer 2

There are a few lightning-bolt-like symbols in Unicode, among them is U+2607 LIGHTNING (☇), though anything approaching realistic would require a special font with an actual lightning bolt glyph.

Answer 3

Ignacio's answer is right, but here is another symbol, which in my font looks better: U+26A1 HIGH VOLTAGE SIGN (⚡)