playful-zsh 🌈

Tiny, playful, dependency-free zsh prompt themes. No Oh-My-Zsh, no Powerlevel, no plugins, no Nerd Fonts — just small zsh scripts you can read in a minute.

You get a two-line prompt with git status, a command timer and a right-side clock, in seventeen themes — peacock's royal blues to matrix's digital rain to diwali's lamp-gold — and then the parts that make it playful: every shell opens with a श्लोक (a verse from the Gita, Ramcharitmanas, Hanuman Chalisa… or Marcus Aurelius), the real moon lives in your prompt, and on festival days the terminal quietly celebrates with you.

Install

One command, anywhere:

git clone https://github.com/indulge/playful-zsh.git ~/.prompt && ~/.prompt/install.sh

The installer adds one managed block to your ~/.zshrc (idempotent — safe to re-run). Restart the shell, or source ~/.zshrc. To start on a particular theme: ~/.prompt/install.sh peacock.

…or with a plugin manager

The repo also ships playful-zsh.plugin.zsh, so if you already run a manager it loads like any other plugin — nothing to clone by hand, nothing appended to your ~/.zshrc:

zgenom load indulge/playful-zsh          # zgenom
antidote bundle indulge/playful-zsh      # antidote
zinit light indulge/playful-zsh          # zinit
antigen bundle indulge/playful-zsh       # antigen
zplug "indulge/playful-zsh"              # zplug

For sheldon, [plugins.playful-zsh] with github = "indulge/playful-zsh".

Oh-My-Zsh takes the usual two steps — its plugin directory has to be named after the plugin file:

git clone https://github.com/indulge/playful-zsh.git \
  "${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/playful-zsh"

then plugins=(… playful-zsh) and ZSH_THEME="" in your ~/.zshrc — Oh-My-Zsh sources its own theme after the plugin list, so left set it paints straight over ours.

Either way theme, shlok and utsav behave identically. Managers that unload plugins (zinit unload indulge/playful-zsh) find a real playful-zsh_plugin_unload: hooks, both chords, the prompt and your file colors go back to exactly what they were before we loaded.

Works out of the box on macOS (zsh is the default shell), Linux, and WSL2 — in iTerm2, Terminal.app, tmux, or any 256-color terminal. Nothing is compiled, so x86 and ARM are the same bytes.

Everyday use — one command: theme

theme                   # 🎨 full-screen picker: browse with live preview
theme peacock           # switch now, remembered next time
theme list              # every theme, current one marked
theme gallery           # preview them all in color
theme random            # surprise me
theme glow on           # ✨ embolden the prompt & file colors
theme nerd on           # icon marks for git/venv/jobs — needs a Nerd Font

The bare theme panel re-chromes itself as you browse — the prompt sample, git segment, and file palette all render in the highlighted theme's colors. ⏎ applies, q keeps yours, g/p/n toggle glow, full paths and nerd icons, and f opens the उत्सव browser (below). Tab-completion knows every name.

Themes

Each theme colors more than the prompt: ls, tree, fd and tab-completion listings follow along, because every theme ships a matching LS_COLORS palette — that's the file row under each prompt above.

name	vibe
peacock	🦚 the flagship — royal blue, emerald & gold; coral only for failure
candy	🍭 bubblegum pinks & mint
bubblegum	🫧 soft pastel candy floss
synthwave	🌆 80s neon magenta & cyan
galaxy	🌌 cosmic violets & starlight
ocean	🌊 deep blues, teal & aqua
forest	🌲 mossy greens & lime
sunset	🌅 warm orange, coral & dusk
rainbow	🌈 full-spectrum, gradient arrows
matrix	💊 digital rain — phosphor greens, λ prompt
dracula	🧛 the editor classic: purple, pink & cyan
gruvbox	📼 retro groove — warm earth tones
nord	🧊 arctic frost blues & aurora accents
crt	🖥️ amber phosphor terminal, ▮ block cursor
diwali	🪔 उत्सव · lamp-gold on the darkest night
holi	🎨 उत्सव · a handful of every color
navratri	🌺 उत्सव · nine nights, nine colors

peacock also shows: user@host over SSH, active venv/conda 🐍, background jobs ✦, the moon 🌔, and iridescent ❯❯❯ arrows that shift one hue along the feather with every command.

Nerd Font icons — strictly opt-in

The default look needs nothing: plain Unicode, any 256-color terminal. But if your terminal already wears a patched font (JetBrainsMono Nerd Font, say), theme nerd on swaps the standard marks — git branch, python venv, background jobs, errors, the timer — for icons, across all seventeen themes. Every other running shell follows along, and decorative marks (diwali's ✦ jewel, galaxy's ★) keep their character.

उत्सव — the terminal celebrates the calendar

festivals.txt carries verified dates for 20 festivals through 2030 (Drik Panchang, New Delhi convention — Diwali, Holi, Navratri, Onam, Chhath, Gurpurab, Baisakhi, Eid-free by design, and more). On a festival day:

• Every shell greets you with that festival's banner.
• The first shell of the day gets the full animated moment — fireworks on Diwali, gulal on Holi, a slow sunrise on Chhath. Once per day across all your shells and tmux panes, never again until next year. Any key skips it instantly.
• While you work, rarely (twenty-plus minutes and many commands apart), a tiny self-erasing spark or moon-glow appears — and vanishes without leaving a line in your scrollback.

Any other day, the moments are yours to summon:

theme utsav             # browse every festival, ⏎ plays its moment
theme utsav holi        # play one directly
utsav list              # the whole roster
Alt-J                   # replay today's (or the last) moment, mid-typing

Occasion-wear themes

Three festivals are also full themes — palette, prompt, file colors — that you can wear any day of the year: theme diwali (lamp-gold on the darkest night), theme holi (a handful of every color), theme navratri (the arrows wear each of the nine nights' colors in turn). Switching to one on its own festival day also plays the moment — the day makes the moment; you make the palette.

श्लोक — verses, offline, any time

Every new shell opens with a verse card in Devanagari with Hindi and English meanings — or a Stoic thought with a Hindi rendering. All text lives in plain files under quotes/; nothing ever touches the network.

shlok                   # a random verse (never the same one twice in a row)
shlok daily             # today's verse — same all day, changes at midnight
shlok gita 2.47         # a specific verse
gita · ramayan · sundarkand · chalisa      # shortcuts per collection
shlok meditations 4.17  # Marcus Aurelius, George Long's translation
shlok list              # browse everything

Alt-G shows a fresh verse right above whatever you're typing.

Add your own collection: drop a quotes/mycollection.txt in the same @title/@icon/@ramp/@art + [id]/t:/v:/hi:/en: format and it joins the rotation automatically.

Little joys (all offline)

• 🌔 The real moon lives in your prompt. Phase from pure date arithmetic; the banner names the पक्ष — and on the true full moon, every verse card rises in moonlight silver.
• 📿 Japa-mala: every 108th command earns एक माला पूर्ण; each 54th — the half-माला — whispers one dim verse line into your work.
• 🪶 Karma-phala consolation: when a command runs ≥10s and fails, one dim Gita line — the effort was yours; the fruit was never yours to hold. When a ≥30s command finally succeeds: 🕊️ a धैर्य line, its quiet twin.
• 🍃 Empathy for exit codes that mean something: a typo (127), a Ctrl-C (130), a script you forgot to chmod +x (126) — one kind line, once per kind per session, never a lecture.
• 🪷 Welcome back: the first command after 30 idle minutes earns a half-verse — cross-shell aware, so six tmux panes greet you once, not six times.
• 🌱 साधना: the shell remembers your lifetime commands. The banner greets you by earned title (जिज्ञासु → शिष्य → साधक → योगी → ऋषि — the next level is always years away), and the farewell knows your total. delights shows where you stand.
• 🛤️ cd-greetings: entering a repo untouched for a week gets one honest line — "last commit here: 19 days ago."
• 🗣️ One voice. However many of these want to speak after a command, at most one line appears above your prompt — the rarest wins, the rest are dropped. A prompt renders after every command; it has no right to chatter.
• ●·● Feather of fortune (peacock theme): the last 8 exit codes as tiny dots, visible only when something recently failed.
• 🙏 Farewell: leaving the shell prints धन्यवाद with your session stats.

Knobs

Set any of these in ~/.zshrc before the managed block; everything defaults to on.

knob	what =0 does
PROMPT_BANNER=0	no ASCII-art startup banner
PROMPT_SHLOK=0	no verse card at startup
PROMPT_KARMA=0	no consolation line on long failures
PROMPT_FAREWELL=0	no धन्यवाद on exit
PROMPT_FOLLOW=0	shells stop following theme switches made elsewhere
PROMPT_UTSAV=0	no festival banners, moments, or ambience
PROMPT_UTSAV_AMBIENT=0	keep the day's banner, drop the while-you-work sparks
PROMPT_UTSAV_KEY='\eo'	rebind the replay key (default Alt-J, only if free)
PROMPT_EMPATHY=0	no kind lines for 126/127/130
PROMPT_WHISPER=0	no धैर्य / welcome-back / half-माला verse lines
PROMPT_WHISPER_GAP=900	seconds between whispers (this is the default)
PROMPT_SADHANA=0	no lifetime titles or totals
PROMPT_CD_GREET=0	no lines when returning to old repos
PROMPT_FULL_PATHS=1	show full paths (%d) instead of %~
PROMPT_NERD=1	start with Nerd Font icon marks (default off; theme nerd toggles and persists)

Make it yours

A theme is one small file in themes/ — a description, an LS_COLORS registration, a preview sample, and an apply function. Copy any existing one; helpers like _pr_gitstr, _pr_timestr, _pr_moonstr and the gradient printer _pr_grad are documented at the top of init.zsh.

A verse collection is one text file in quotes/ (format above).

A festival is one registry line in utsav.zsh plus its dates in festivals.txt. The dates table is verified through 2030 — refresh it from a published panchang before then; when it runs out, the feature simply goes quiet.

Uninstall

~/.prompt/uninstall.sh   # removes the block from ~/.zshrc; files stay

Installed as a plugin, drop it from your manager's config as you would any other bundle — and to take it out of a shell you're already sitting in, without restarting, playful-zsh_plugin_unload.