Awesome symbols and characters in a bash prompt

Question

I just ran across a screenshot of someone's terminal:

Is there a list of all of the characters which can be used in a Bash prompt, or can someone get me the character for the star and the right arrow?

Answer 1

You can use any printable character, bash doesn't mind. You'll probably want to configure your terminal to support Unicode (in the form of UTF-8).

There are a lot of characters in Unicode, so here are a few tips to help you search through the Unicode charts:

• You can try to draw the character on Shapecatcher. It tries to recognize a Unicode character in what you draw.
• You can try to figure out which block the character is in. For example, that weird-looking symbol and that star would be in a block of miscellaneous symbols; characters like Ǫ and ı are latin letters with modifiers; ∉ is a mathematical symbol, and so on.
• You can try to think of a word in the description of the character and look for it in a list of unicode symbol names and descriptions. Gucharmap or Kcharselect can help.

P.S. On Shapecatcher, I got U+2234 THEREFORE for ∴, U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW for →, U+263F MERCURY for ☿ and U+2605 BLACK STAR for ★.

In a bash script, up to bash 4.1, you can write a byte by its code point, but not a character. If you want to avoid non-ASCII characters to make your .bashrc resilient to file encoding changes, you'll need to enter the bytes corresponding to these characters in the UTF-8 encoding. You can see the hexidecimal values by running echo ∴ → ☿ ★ | hexdump -C in a UTF-8 terminal, e.g. ∴ is encoded by \xe2\x88\xb4 in UTF-8.

if [[ $LC_CTYPE =~ '\.[Uu][Tt][Ff]-?8' ]]; then
  PS1=$'\\[\e[31m\\]\xe2\x88\xb4\\[\e[0m\\]\n\xe2\x86\x92 \xe2\x98\xbf \\~ \\[\e[31m\\]\xe2\x98\x85 $? \\[\e[0m\\]'
fi

Since bash 4.2, you can use \u followed by 4 hexadecimal digits in a $'…' string.

  PS1=$'\\[\e[31m\\]\u2234\\[\e[0m\\]\n\u2192 \u263f \\~ \\[\e[31m\\]\u2605 $? \\[\e[0m\\]'

Answer 2

You can find the unicode symbols on lots of sites, like this one: http://panmental.de/symbols/info.htm

You just have to make sure that your term supports UTF-8.

Answer 3

i like using these tools — they have a nice experience, and it's easy to search through:

• unicode character table
• amp-what, scoped to unicode characters