I’ve been using Arch since October 2019 and I’ve stuck with it because it has been a really comfortable experience. I really love the package manager. The packages are usually new enough to not cause me any major problems but are tested enough to not break anything. Regarding the latter point, mileage might vary. I have never had anything break on me that I haven’t broken myself (and I don’t update very frequently) though I know not everybody is sharing that experience.

1 year ago I also started using NixOS on my desktop and it’s been a very interesting experience. Design wise it’s pretty good but there are a number of things that really annoy me. Some days I’m really considering putting NixOS on my laptop and some days I’m leaning more to putting Arch back on my desktop.

I mean the function syntax is pretty much just taken from Lambda Calculus.

I’m mainly using zsh but I have a backup bash prompt that closely mirrors it. It shows the return value of the previous command if it’s non-zero and gives some information about the current git repository if there is one.

retval() {
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
                printf ""
        else
                printf "\001\e[31m\002($?)\001\e[0m\002"
        fi
}

gitbranch() {
        if type git 2> /dev/null 1> /dev/null && git rev-parse 2> /dev/null 1> /dev/null ; then
                MODIFIED=""
                if [[ -n $(git status --short) ]]; then
                        MODIFIED=" M"
                fi
                BRANCH=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
                SHORTREF=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)
                printf "\001\e[31m\002%s\001\e[0m\002(%s)\001\e[31m\002%s\001\e[0m\002" $BRANCH $SHORTREF $MODIFIED
        else
                echo -n ""
        fi
}

export PROMPT_DIRTRIM=3

PS1='$(retval)[\001\e[1;95m\002\u\001\e[0m\002@\h : \w $(gitbranch)] \$ '
PS2='> '