The adoption of FOSS tools for development has meant that a lot of my time is spent at my trusty terminal prompt. I took some time today to make mine a bit more awesome. Quick Left has killer couches, beanbags, spare rooms, and standing desks. This means I'm mobile a lot, and that my battery level is a concern, so I decided to add this to my prompt:

I'm using iTerm2, zsh, and oh-my-zsh, as you all should be. The code is posted here as a gist, but I'll go ahead and show the fun stuff here:

A quick walkthrough: The battery.rb needs to be in a directory that's in your path. I chose usr/local/lib

The encoding is necessary because of the fancy arrow characters. Skip that if you're fine with hyphens. The first two lines backtick to the Power**M**anagement**SET**tings tools, and asks for the battery status. This output is typically like

Currently drawing from 'AC Power'
-InternalBattery-0 85%; charging; 0:23 remaining

A quick one-liner strips out the percentage value, and a color is chosen based on how full the battery is. This is joined into an output string, and that's what gets displayed in the prompt.

Now, like a Roomba, I'll always know when to go back home and charge up. Awesome!