I'm using something similar, but ran into a problem recently: go into a detached head mode (`git checkout HEAD^`). ALL your branches (local and remote) are spat out into your PS1. It's rare enough that I haven't looked into fixing it, but have any suggestions?
The best thing I ever did for my prompt was switch to zsh and start using oh-my-zsh[1]. Zsh itself has a handful of interesting features, but oh-my-zsh's built-in prompt theme support means I can cycle through prompts (most of which also include git or rvm info) with impunity.
I'm currently using[1] a PS1 that shows branch name, whether any files in the repo need to be staged or committed and whether the repo is behind or ahead of the remote. (Credit to Adam Vandenberg[2] and Brian Carper[3] for whatever good ideas it contains.)
My major step forward in bash prompt setup earlier this year was realising it didn't have to be a single line.
I have one info line which tells me path, user, host, git branch etc. And then the prompt sits nicely on the line below and is always at the same alignment.
* ugh * does anyone actually like that avatar animation, and the slow scrolling that results from it?
I find the comments here far more useful, and they aren't one-line commands with no explanation of the parts. Thanks for the submission, for the discussion's sake, but I'm not going back to that blog any time soon.
Canary Chrome in OSX. It's been stuttery in every browser I've used, in multiple OSes; I've been on the site a couple times in the past for other posts (I think most via HN). To clarify: it doesn't crawl, but it's not smooth.
Looking at the profiler in Chrome, I'm not seeing any unnecessary events while scrolling between things - maybe it's a transparency somewhere instead? Removing a handful I could find did speed things up, though I probably missed a few. Browsers are still lame at those, unfortunately :/
Shows the ruby version, rvm gemset, working directory and git branch, followed by a thunderbolt prompt. This is how I set it https://gist.github.com/1120566
http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2011-08-02_at_8.47.1...