linux

Saving space in the terminal with symbols

Nathan Broadbent

Nathan Broadbent

— 1 min read
Saving space in the terminal with symbols

I'm saving a little space in my terminal by replacing my username and group (ndbroadbent) with a single symbol. I'm doing this in my prompt, as well as in the output of ls commands:

ls and prompt with symbols

(My laptop's hostname is also represented by a symbol.)

For the ls output, it was a bit tricky to re-justify the username and group columns after substituting my username. I decided to do it in ruby, and then played some ruby golf:

o=STDIN.read;re=/^(([^ ]_ +){2})(([^ ]_ +){3})/;u,g,s=o.lines.map{|l|l[re,3]}.compact.map(&:split).transpose.map{|a|a.map(&:size).max+1};puts o.lines.map{|l|l.sub(re){|m|"%s%-#{u}s %-#{g}s%#{s}s "%[$1,*$3.split]}}

This little script parses the modified output of ls -lhv, calculates the max length of the user/group/size columns, and then pads those columns with the correct number of spaces.

My final ls command looks like this:

ls -lhv --group-directories-first | sed \"s/$USER/\$(/bin/cat $HOME/.user_sym)/g\" | rejustify_ls_columns

(where rejustify_ls_columns is a function wrapping the ruby script above.)

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