That's all quite easy to change in the rprompt() function. I tried hard to factor everything out, so the prompt content specification itself is clear and obviou

That's all quite easy to change in the rprompt() function. I tried hard to factor everything out, so the prompt content specification itself is clear and obvious. Basically, for the reasons you mention, I dislike having that info set in PS1, but I find it considerably less distracting when right-justified. Having it visible, though, makes it easy to ascertain the execution context of commands in the terminal history buffer. The status of last run command I have on my PS1. If it exits 0, then it's just a simple $ otherwise, it's: errno$ I do like your idea of showing current background jobs, but I find myself relying more on tmux windows than background jobs, so I suspect that number would be mostly constant for myself anyway.