Actually I had most of that information in my bash prompt before I switched to Zsh (the battery level and repo-characters are the only things that are really new).<p>To get to that point I'd been poking around and tweaking for somewhere around 4-5 years, so no, it's not just a case of wanting to use as much of Zsh as possible.  Actually very little of that prompt is Zsh-specific.<p>You might find it distracting, that's fine.  I don't.  My eyes/brain have adapted to recognize the prompt line(s) as a whole unit.  I don't read every single item every single time I see the prompt.  But when I <i>do</i> need a piece of information it's right there in front of me and my eyes can home in on it quickly thanks to the color-coding.<p>Examples:<p>When I'm switching directories a lot (maybe I'm setting up a new project and installing plugins) my eyes tend to focus on the green text in the center (current directory).<p>When I'm merging translation branches for hgtip.com's content repository my eyes focus on the magenta text near the right (the current branch).<p>When I'm using MQ a lot my eyes focus on the list of MQ patches.<p>The "dirty" flags ("?" and "!" at the right) always jump right out at me if they're there, because they're a different color than the text to the left of them and there's not even a space as a separator.