Displaying only final branch of current working directory on command prompt?

Question

My current command prompt displays the entire path from my home directory to my cwd. For instance a possible command prompt would be ~/Desktop/images/japan λ. How do I make it such that it always shows only the most precise location in my cwd. For example the previous command prompt would instead be japan λ or ~/japan λ.

My current zshrc file which implements my command prompt contains:

PS1='%F{cyan}%~ %B%F{yellow}λ%f%b '
RPS1='%B%(?.%F{green}✓.%F{red}✗)%f%b'
PS2='%B%F{yellow}⤷%f%b '

I don't know about zsh, but bash allows commands inside the prompt, such as `PS1='$(basename $PWD) # '` — berndbausch, Feb 25 '21 at 04:31
Related: [Shorten path in zsh prompt](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/273529/shorten-path-in-zsh-prompt) — steeldriver, Feb 25 '21 at 12:49

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 25 '21 at 04:30

Looking at http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Prompt-Expansion.html it shows that you can do this by giving the %~ prompt expansion in PS1 an integer right after the percentage sign.

PS1='%F{cyan}%1~ %B%F{yellow}λ%f%b '

The 1 after the percent will get you what you want.

Displaying only final branch of current working directory on command prompt?

1 Answers1