Curious how you get your ZSH prompt to show how nested you are in environments?

[createchange]

From watching your video on profiling ZSH startup times, I noticed that, as you were dropping into new shells, the > part of the prompt was showing precisely how far nested you were in shells. I did some looking through your .zshrc, but nothing caught my eye as pertains to this. I was hoping you could let me know as I would love to replicate that!

[wincent]

Hi @createchange 👋🏻

The $SHLVL variable tells you how many levels deep you are.

• In my .tmux.conf, I tell tmux to always start at level 1.
• I have some logic to adjust it depending on things like platform, putting the calculated value in $LVL.
• And then in this line you can see it being used. I don't blame you for not finding this 🤣 — the bit that matters is this: $(printf '\u276f%.0s' {1..$LVL}), which prints one unicode \u276f character (❯) per level.
• The other bits are kind of explained in comments, or you could paste it into ChatGPT or ask Copilot to explain it 😁.

[createchange]

Ah ha! Thanks for sending me down the right path. You're a wizard!

As an aside, very related note... because I am not a wizard, I have been using starship to enhance my shell, and realized that they have a native implementation for this:

format = "$all$directory$shlvl$character"
right_format = "$battery"

[character]
success_symbol = "[❯](bold green) "
error_symbol = "[❯](bold red) "

[shlvl]
disabled = false
format = '[$symbol]($style)'
repeat = true
symbol = '❯'
repeat_offset = 1
threshold = 2