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What's new #2

· 4 min read
Jan De Dobbeleer
Jan De Dobbeleer
Maintainer

Wouldn't have imagined doing part two in a week's time, but here we are again!

Features​

CLI interface (also #2)​

In the previous post I highlighted some changes in the CLI interface. Turns out I could make it even more straightfoward. As Oh My Posh is a prompt generating utility, the prompt command doesn't make sense as that's implied. It has been removed, although it will keep working to not break existing functionality on upgrade.

Init​

The following initialization:

oh-my-posh prompt init pwsh | Invoke-Expression

now becomes:

oh-my-posh init pwsh | Invoke-Expression

Debug​

To debug Oh My Posh, you can simply use the debug command. It's smart enough to know your config so you don't have to specify the --config option.

oh-my-posh debug

Fish shell​

We already supported fish shell for a while, but we stepped up the game. I started using fish as my primary shell, so obviously it couldn't stay behind. I suggest you also have a go at it, it's a very enjoyable experience.

But OK, what changed? We now support the following out-of-the-box:

It seems there's no support (yet) for a secondary prompt in fish, once that's available we can easily add that too. To enjoy all of this, upgrade to the latest and initialize fish by adding the following line to ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

oh-my-posh init fish | source

Transient prompt​

Speaking of transient, it learned some new tricks. First, you can now use the .Code property to work with the last command's error code (if any) in the template. This can for example be used to color the transient prompt differently when the last command failed. That did imply we also needed support for color templates, as that wasn't possible just yet. Say no more, we now have a transient prompt that supports color templates.

"transient_prompt": {
    "background": "p:yellow",
    "background_templates": [
      "{{ if gt .Code 0 }}p:red{{ end }}"
    ],
    "foreground": "p:black",
    "foreground_templates": [
      "{{ if gt .Code 0 }}p:white{{ end }}"
    ],
    "template": "<background,transparent>\ue0b6</> {{ .Folder }} <background,transparent>\ue0b0</><,transparent> </>"
}

Which produces the following result:

Terminal

Config version 2​

Remember we did a migration to config version 1 in the beginning of the year? Well, we did a migration to version 2. Looking at Oh My Posh's architecture, the different prompts (transient, secondary, ...) were moving closer to the model used by segments. The only difference was that template wasn't a property, but a field of those prompts. As all segments now have template support, it was a no-brainer to align both models and do a migration to config version 2 so nobody would have any manual work in the process.

The following segment definition:

{
  "background": "#9A348E",
  "foreground": "#ffffff",
  "leading_diamond": "\ue0b6",
  "properties": {
    "template": "{{ .UserName }} "
  },
  "style": "diamond",
  "type": "session"
}

Will now be migrated to this for version 2:

{
  "background": "#9A348E",
  "foreground": "#ffffff",
  "leading_diamond": "\ue0b6",
  "style": "diamond",
  "template": "{{ .UserName }} ",
  "type": "session"
}

Go 1.18​

Not something that impacts the end user directly, but maybe interesting to know is that Oh My Posh is now using go 1.18 by default. This brings obvious language improvements and a few new features we can play with. The most notable is generics, but it doesn't seem like we can benefit just yet as it's not yet supported for methods, and that's the main use-case for us.

Nontheless, it's good to stay up-to-date, if you notice any quirks though, be sure to let us know!

That's it for this week, see you for the next one 🤞🏻

_Keep that prompt posh everyone! _