Switching to mercurial: taming zsh

A quick one, so you’ll know not all my posts must have so many words. PEP 385 is materializing, and its time to learn Mercurial. I can’t say I’m a Mercurial expert, but I thought migrating all my git-oriented-zsh-gizmos would help me along the way. The conversion is almost done and had just one somewhat noteworthy tidbit.

A while back I copied from a friend a rather elaborate zsh prompt (not as elaborate as some people’s…), which includes my current git branch (if any) in it. The code to make it looked like this:
[sourcecode lang=”bash”]
parse_git_branch() {
git branch –no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e ‘/^[^*]/d’ -e ‘s/* \(.*\)/(\1)/’
}

function _rprompt_git {
local git_branch="$(parse_git_branch)"
if [ -n "$git_branch" ]; then
result=":%{$fg[blue]%}$git_branch$rst"
fi
echo -n $result
}
[/sourcecode]
I’ve naïvely added a Mercurial equivalent to parse_git_branch using hg bookmarks or hg branch, and retrofitted/redubbed _rprompt_git into _rprompt_dvcs. It worked well, but was slow. I’m not the kind of person to give hg grief over reasonable speed differences with the speed monster, but you can’t wait 0.15 seconds for your friggin’ prompt, now can you (this is not an invitation for a git/hg/bzr performance holy war in the comments, people). Removing a call to hg by using $ hg root just once, storing that value and using cat to get the actual branch/bookmark didn’t speed things up enough. #mercurial on freenode was kind but didn’t know how to help, other than suggest I buy a really fast computer… Blah, I’ll have to jot something out in C.

One bitbucket account later and a bit of tinkering led to fast_hg_root, which is a dumb C program which acts as a (fast) replacement to hg root. So now my dvcs-prompt-related code includes:
[sourcecode lang=”bash”]
parse_git_branch() {
git branch –no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e ‘/^[^*]/d’ -e ‘s/* \(.*\)/(\1)/’
}

parse_hg_branch() {
if ! HG_ROOT=$(fast_hg_root) 2> /dev/null; then
# not an HG repository, quit
return
fi
BOOKMARK=$(cat "$HG_ROOT"/.hg/bookmarks.current 2> /dev/null)
if [ -n "$BOOKMARK" ]; then
# have a current bookmark, display that
echo $BOOKMARK
return
fi
# display the current branch or ‘default’
cat "$HG_ROOT"/.hg/branch 2> /dev/null || echo ‘default’
}

function _rprompt_dvcs {
local git_branch="$(parse_git_branch)"
if [ -n "$git_branch" ]; then
result=":%{$fg[blue]%}$git_branch$rst"
else
local hg_branch="$(parse_hg_branch)"
if [ -n "$hg_branch" ]; then
result=":%{$fg[green]%}$hg_branch$rst"
fi
fi
echo -n $result
}
[/sourcecode]

Which leads to my terminal sessions on my netbook monica looking like so:

C’est tout. If someone is interested, I’ll open a repository with more of my .zsh.d stuff. By the way, anyone knows of a good way to capture a terminal into HTML, preserving ANSI color? I know of ttyrec and found HTML::FromANSI, but was hoping for a finished program or at least, uhm, a library less in Perl. :p