mjhjmtu

I've recently switched to Parrot linux and I'm very happy with it, but there's just one thing, this default fancy bash prompt is really ugly.
I used zsh before, and for some reasons I want to go back to bash but I'd love
to get the same prompt "theme" that I had with zsh, whish was very sober.

I especially like the way it only display the first character of the directories names in the path except the current one.

I'm searching how I could write this in the .bashrc but I'm not finding anything.

Borrowing heavily from Dennis Kaarsemaker's answer:

PROMPT_COMMAND='_abbrev_pwd=$(sed -e "s:$HOME:~:" -e "s:/(.)[^/]*:/1:g" <<< "$(dirname "$PWD")")/"$(basename "$PWD")"'
PS1='u@h $_abbrev_pwd> '

The PROMPT_COMMAND variable is a special bash variable that is executed each time a prompt is about to be printed. The code here sets a variable named _abbrev_pwd to the concatenation of the following elements:

• the output of a sed command: $(sed -e ... <<< ...)
  


• a forward slash /
  


• the "current" directory: $(basename "$PWD")
  

The sed command itself takes a here-string as input; that here-string is the result of calling dirname "$PWD" in order to strip off the current directory. That string is then subject to two replacements (given in the -e sed options):

1. replace any appearance of your "$HOME" directory with a tilde, and


2. replace any path element (forward slash, a captured single character ., then any number of non-forward-slashes) with a forward slash followed by that (captured) single character; repeat that pattern match "globally" with the g flag. I've used : as the sed search & replace delimiter instead of the common /, in order to avoid leaning toothpick syndrome in trying to escape the desired forward slashes.

Lastly, we set PS1 to use the _abbrev_pwd variable where you would normally put the $PWD.