Theming

Liquid Prompt has a strong data and theming engine, allowing it to be extremely flexible and customizable.

There are multiple methods of customizing your prompt that are easy to get confused. These are:

• Presets: a preset is simply an example config file. Parts or all of a preset can be copied to your own config file, or you can source the presets inside your config file, letting you combine, extend, or override any of the configuration options. If you just want to change icons and/or colors, presets are a good starting place. See contrib/presets for examples. Presets can generally be combined, and some themes may use —or be compatible with— different presets. See Config Options.

• Themes: a theme is a set of shell functions that control everything about prompt generation. Liquid Prompt ships with a theme named default enabled by default, as well as a few more (see Included Themes). This is a layer beyond simple configuration options. You can write your own themes, but this is complicated and generally not necessary to make the modifications most users want to make.

• Templates: a template (previously called “themes” in Liquid Prompt version 1) is specific to the Default Theme, allowing for a user to re-order the sections of the default theme. This gives more control than just the configuration options can give, but is much simpler to do than writing a full theme.

See the Liquid Prompt Theme List on the wiki for user created themes.

If you want to create your own theme, see Custom Themes.

• Default Theme
  • Preview
  • Configuration
  • Templates
• Included Themes
  • Alternate VCS Details Theme
  • Powerline Theme
  • Unfold Theme
• Custom Themes
  • Defining a Theme
  • Getting Data
  • Examples
  • Sharing Your Theme

Switching Themes

In a nutshell

To use a theme, just source its file in your shell configuration file, after having load the liquidprompt, and then call lp_theme:

source <your_path>/liquidprompt
source <your_path>/themes/unfold/unfold.theme
lp_theme unfold

More Details

Liquid Prompt can switch between themes on the fly. The shell does not need to be reloaded, and no files need to be sourced after the initial source.

To load (but not activate) a theme, simply source the theme file. For example, to load the included Alternate VCS Details theme, source the theme file:

$ source themes/alternate_vcs/alternate_vcs.theme

Now both the default theme and Alternate VCS are loaded. To show what themes are loaded and available, run lp_theme():

$ lp_theme --list
default
alternate_vcs

To switch to a different theme, call lp_theme() with the name of the theme as the argument:

$ lp_theme alternate_vcs

The prompt will immediately take on the new theme.

To switch back to the default theme, call lp_theme() again with default as the argument instead.

If you add the theme source commands to your shell startup file, you will have your favorite themes ready to be switched to at any time.