Reading a git repository's whole state from the prompt, one glyph at a time.
Once the prompt was mine, I taught its git segment to say everything a git status would, in a line you read without stopping. This is the whole vocabulary, glyph by glyph.
Turning KronuZSH's full prompt into quiet, accurate scrollback.
Owning my zsh setup made the next refinement possible: keep the full prompt while I am working, then leave behind one quiet, syntax-colored command that the terminal still understands.
Down to the core
I used a sliver of Prezto's 22,000 lines, so I kept the part I cared about, my prompt, and wrote the few hundred lines of shell setup I wanted around it. Then I found out how many small conveniences the framework had been providing all along.
