Modifying the agnoster theme for zsh

Even though I have been a long time user of oh-my-zsh on zsh (moved from plain bash to zsh like 10 years ago), I have been very minimal on my use of its theme capabilities. I have used the default theme forever: robbyrussell. But recently I was showing my friend @craftycoder the tweaks I have on my system (fzf, autojump, etc) and he showed me this theme, agnoster. It had several pieces I liked:

Powerline-style prompt
Git status
Virtualenv detection

But, I wasn’t sold on some of the default decisions, so I decided to completely tweak and remove stuff I didn’t need. You can have a look here.

What did I want to modify?

Too long branch names. Looks very nice with master but is a bit more troublesome with feature/SAS-4028/kubernetes/poc
I don’t care that much about the path. Current directory is enough
Usually I like knowing in which git project I am in better

Path

I played around with several options to make the path look as I would like. I started with the shrink-path Zsh plugin, but I didn’t totally like how it looked. I cobbled together a bit of awk to get 2 or 3 characters out of each piece of the path instead, it didn’t look much better but was taking much more space. Ended up with just current dir, this is excellent actually.

Branch name

Paths at work are of the form {kind}/{ticket number}/{description}. I don’t want to know all the pieces. Kind is any of feature, hotfix (very rarely) or occasionally might be something else. It could be shortened to just a few letters. In general, I like seeing the full ticket number (no specific reason). I don’t need to know the full description, it can be shortened to 4 or 5 characters. Awk to the rescue. I love awk. With it I reduced the branch names to what I wanted, additionally I wrote a small checker that makes Spark’s style pull request naming also be shortened. You can check the awk approach here.

Git project

Knowing the project and current folder is everything I need to know. If I need to know more, I just pwd.

Error under last command, root, background processing

I don’t like my prompt to change shape. I changed the error reporting to switch colours of the current directory to red. And dropped background processes and root reporting, since I’m never root on my machine, and never run anything in the background unless it needs to be globally.