nick

A Powerline-style zsh theme derived from agnoster, with a git segment that never blocks the prompt.

Segments, left to right: exit status and job count, user@host when it is not the usual you, git, node version, directory.

Install

Clone into oh-my-zsh's themes directory and point ZSH_THEME at the file inside it. This is the same layout powerlevel10k uses.

git clone https://github.com/seankoji-com/zsh-theme-nick \
  ~/.oh-my-zsh_custom/themes/zsh-theme-nick

ZSH_THEME="zsh-theme-nick/nick"

Needs a Nerd Font for the segment separators and glyphs.

The git segment

git status in a prompt is fine until you open a large repo on a network filesystem, at which point every prompt waits on it. The probe runs in a background worker and the prompt reads a cache.

One probe, one fork. Branch, upstream divergence, file states and stash presence all come from a single background job, because asking git separately for each means three forks per prompt, which is most of what the worker was meant to avoid.

Indicators:

Glyph	Meaning
◉	Staged changes
✱	Modified files
?	Untracked files
$	A stash exists
↑n ↓n	Commits ahead of, behind upstream

The segment is mint when clean, amber when dirty. A stash on its own does not count as dirty.

Under WezTerm, unmerged conflicts get a red curly underline on the branch name. That state is easy to lose among the other glyphs.

Async provider

Registration needs async_start_worker and async_job. oh-my-zsh vendors a copy in lib/git.zsh, and mafredri/zsh-async also works. With neither, the prompt still works and just probes synchronously.

If you use oh-my-zsh, its own async git prompt is on by default and feeds git_prompt_info, which this theme never calls. Turn it off so you are not paying for a result nothing reads:

zstyle ':omz:alpha:lib:git' async-prompt no

Configuration

Variable	Effect
DEFAULT_USER	Hides the user@host segment for this username
NICK_WORKTREE_MARKER	Path fragment marking a worktree checkout, default /.claude/worktrees/. Set to '' to disable

Inside a worktree the directory segment gets a dotted underline, so it is obvious which checkout a shell is sitting in. WezTerm only.

The node segment shows only inside a Node project. If .nvmrc disagrees with the running node, the version gets a dashed underline. Prefix match, so an .nvmrc of 18 is satisfied by v18.19.0.

Terminal support

Styled and coloured underlines are a WezTerm SGR extension. Everywhere else they are suppressed rather than printed as raw escape bytes, so the theme degrades to plain text.

Licence

MIT