Overview

I recently spent some brief time working on a project where they used Oh My Bash (OMB) as the default shell… prettifier?

It’s effectively Oh My Zsh (OMZ) for ~~the elderly~~ Gen X-ers.

If you hated OMZ, you can hate OMB too. (I didn’t like OMZ at all when I briefly used it, but that’s a ‘me’ not an ‘it’ thing. I’m sure given time I’d have grown to love it, I just didn’t have time… at the time.)

Installing

The documentation covers both interactive and unattended installation, it’s all pretty straightforward.

Note: If you’re working in a regulated environment, obviously do your due dilligence, don’t just blithely run random stuff from the internet. Review the install script, maybe move it and a mirror of the upstream repo into an artefact repo that provides a degree of governance and surety.

Interactive:

$ bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash/master/tools/install.sh)"

Unattended:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash/master/tools/install.sh)" --unattended

Configuring

The primary thing you’ll want to configure is the prompt theme. This, in addition to your laptop stickers, will convey appropriate levels of leet status to your peers and random train people.

Update ~/.bashrc with your prefered theme:

[wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ vi +12 ~/.bashrc

# Set name of the theme to load. Optionally, if you set this to "random"
# it'll load a random theme each time that oh-my-bash is loaded.
OSH_THEME="powerline-light"

(Line numbers shown for context.)

Customising

Custom Aliases

Motivation

Adding your own custom aliases to Oh My Bash (OMB) is relatively simple but requires a few things to be set Just So.

In this quick example, I wanted to be able to switch the OMB prompt on-the-fly relatively dynamically between fancy and simpler text-based themes.

powerline-light is my prefered default theme, but doesn’t render well or read clearly when copied/pasted in to text or Markdown.

This makes it less than ideal when writing documentation or examples.

morris is a much more traditional prompt which can largely be copied/pasted straight into documentation on-the-fly and remain clear and readable. (Most of the examples in this Gist are using morris for clarity.)

The obvious solution is a quick alias to switch themes on-the-fly, which in turn leads to OMB’s custom alias definition (although it could just as easily be dropped into the end of ~/.bashrc.

Steps

Review the structure of $OSH_CUSTOM:

 [wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ tree $OSH_CUSTOM
 /home/wmcdonald/.oh-my-bash/custom
 ├── aliases
 │   └── example.aliases.sh
 ├── completions
 │   └── example.completion.sh
 ├── example.sh
 ├── plugins
 │   └── example
 │       └── example.plugin.sh
 └── themes
     └── example
         └── example.theme.sh

Create your custom alias file

 [wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ cat $OSH_CUSTOM/aliases/custom.aliases.sh
 alias simple='source ${OSH}/themes/morris/morris.theme.sh'
 alias fancy='source ${OSH}/themes/powerline-light/powerline-light.theme.sh'

Include your custom alias in the alias() array

Edit the ~/.bashrc:
```
 [wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ vim +'set nu' +99 ~/.bashrc
```
Add custom to the aliases() array (line numbers shown for context):
```
 99:aliases=(
 100-  general
 101-  custom
 102-)
```

Test

Run the src alias to re-source the default ~/.bashrc:

 [wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ alias | grep src
 alias src='source ~/.bashrc'
 [wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ src

Check the aliases exist:

 wmcdonald > ~ > alias | grep -E 'simple|fancy'
 alias fancy='source ${OSH}/themes/powerline-light/powerline-light.theme.sh'
 alias simple='source ${OSH}/themes/morris/morris.theme.sh'

Call each alias in turn:

 wmcdonald > ~ > simple
 [wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ fancy
 wmcdonald > ~ >

Note: the effect is far more obvious and pronounced when you see this in-the-shell. cf: powerline-light vs. morris

…
Profit!

References

TODO

Update https://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash/wiki/Articles ?
Split out the install / initial configure from the alias and function customisation, or structure more consistently/readably?