SSH Colors

I like to use colors in the shell to help me identify which machine I’m on. I also like to keep my dotfiles under git so it helps to have a simple way to programmatically set which color I should be using on which machine.

if [ "$SSH_CONNECTION" == "" ]; then
    # Yellow prompt for local login
    PS1="[\[\033[01;33m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\W\[\033[00m\]\]]$ "
else
    # Red prompt for remote login
    PS1="[\[\033[01;31m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\W\[\033[00m\]\]]$ "
fi

By checking the existence of the $SSH_CONNECTION variable it is easy to set one color for my local machine and a different color for remote machines.

Timestamp

I’ve also found it useful to know roughly when a command was started and ended. By prepending the timestamp to my prompt it is easy

# Add Timestamp
export PS1="[\[\033[01;32m\]\t\[\033[00m\]\]]$PS1"

Where \t adds the timestamp