Purpose of the white cross at the beginning of the prompt

[johnnymetz]

What is the purpose of the white cross with the black background at the beginning of the prompt?

It doesn't seem to change at all. Can I change it to an emoji or something else?

[Asjas]

Wes probably just wanted to use it as a symbol, it's an emoji that you can change yourself. It's on the end of this line 🙂

https://github.com/wesbos/Cobalt2-iterm/blob/master/cobalt2.zsh-theme#L52

[outofcontrol]

Okay, it's been awhile, but stumbled across this will updating my dotfiles. The cross appears when you are ssh to a different users on the same machine, or when you ssh into a different machine that also has the cobalt2 setup.

[7stud]

I'm using Terminal on macOS, and I used https://github.com/jabranr/cobalt2-like to setup the cobalt2 theme in Terminal. The instructions there have us do your installation first, then some additional steps. When I open a Terminal window, I get the cross at the start of the prompt. $DEFAULT_USER is not set nor is $SSH_CLIENT. I have seen some examples where there is a home icon or folder icon at the start of the prompt depending on what directory you are in. Any suggestions for getting that setup?

Somewhere, someone suggested doing this:

---

You could write a function like this, replacing 'home' and 'not home' with your icons

zsh_prompt_home_indicator() {
    if [[ "$PWD" = "$HOME" ]];then
        echo "home"
    else
        echo "not home"
    fi
}

then add $(zsh_prompt_home_indicator) to your PROMPT where you want the icons to appear.

---

I tried the following in ~/.oh_my_zsh/themes/cobalt2.zsh-theme:

...
...
prompt_context() {
  local user=`whoami`

  #if [[ "$user" != "$DEFAULT_USER" || -n "$SSH_CLIENT" ]]; then
  if [[ -n "$SSH_CLIENT" ]]; then   <====CHANGED
    prompt_segment black default "%(!.%{%F{yellow}%}.)✝"
  else   <=============ADDED
    prompt_segment blue default "%(!.%{%F{yellow}%}.)"   <==========ADDED
  fi
}

...
...

##### I added this: ######
zsh_prompt_home_indicator() {
    if [[ "$PWD" = "$HOME" ]];then
        echo 🏡
    else
        echo 📂
    fi
}
###################

PROMPT='%{%f%b%k%}$(zsh_prompt_home_indicator)$(build_prompt) '

That "works" somewhat: the icons are displayed correctly at the start of the prompt, but they are not on a blue background. As a test, I used the cross character in the else branch of prompt_context(), and I deleted $(zsh_prompt_home_indicator) from the PROMPT= line, and the cross does appear on the blue background. I surmise that the icons I'm using take up the whole area allotted for the character or don't have a transparent background. Where do the icons, like on this guys cobalt2 themed prompt, come from: https://youtu.be/8JJ101D3knE?si=kSk1_kaJG2bUON_K&t=820