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The dir segment — which shows the current working directory — is arguably the most important piece of information in any shell prompt. Powerlevel10k goes to great lengths to keep it readable at any terminal width: it highlights the parts of the path that matter most and truncates the rest with the least possible loss of information.

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How truncation works

When the full directory path does not fit on the prompt line, Powerlevel10k shortens it by replacing the leftmost segments with their shortest unique prefix. For example, if ~/work is the only directory under ~ that starts with wo, it can be abbreviated to ~/wo. It cannot be shortened further to ~/w if another directory like ~/wireguard also starts with w. This strategy — called truncate_to_unique — is set by the POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_STRATEGY parameter: 
# If directory is too long, shorten some of its segments to the shortest possible unique
# prefix. The shortened directory can be tab-completed to the original.
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_STRATEGY=truncate_to_unique

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Three segment colours

Every segment of the path is rendered in one of three distinct colours so you can immediately tell how much information has been retained:
  • Truncated segments are shown in a bleak, dim colour. They have been shortened and may not be unique if you have created new directories since the prompt was drawn.
  • Important (anchor) segments are shown in a bright colour and are never truncated. These always include the first path component, the last component, and the roots of Git repositories. You always see them in full.
  • Regular segments — those that are shown in full but could in principle be shortened — use an in-between colour.
The corresponding parameters in ~/.p10k.zsh are: 
# Default current directory foreground color.
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_FOREGROUND=254

# Color of the shortened directory segments.
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_SHORTENED_FOREGROUND=250

# Color of the anchor directory segments. Anchor segments are never shortened. The first
# segment is always an anchor.
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_ANCHOR_FOREGROUND=255

# Display anchor directory segments in bold.
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_ANCHOR_BOLD=true

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Configuration parameters

The key parameters that control directory display and truncation behaviour are:
ParameterDefaultPurpose
POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_BACKGROUND4Background colour of the dir segment
POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_FOREGROUND254Foreground colour of regular path segments
POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_SHORTENED_FOREGROUND250Foreground colour of truncated (shortened) segments
POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_ANCHOR_FOREGROUND255Foreground colour of anchor (important, never-shortened) segments
POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_ANCHOR_BOLDtrueWhether anchor segments are rendered in bold
POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_STRATEGYtruncate_to_uniqueAlgorithm used to shorten path segments
POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_DIR_LENGTH1Number of trailing path segments that are always treated as anchors
All of these can be found and edited in ~/.p10k.zsh.

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Tab-completing a truncated path

If you copy a truncated directory path from your scrollback and paste it into the command line, you can press Tab to expand it to the full, unambiguous path. Powerlevel10k’s shortened directories are valid path prefixes that Zsh’s completion system can resolve automatically.

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Rainbow style: visibility caveat

In Rainbow style, the current working directory is displayed as bright white text on a blue background. The white is a fixed colour, but “blue” is whatever colour number 4 maps to in your terminal’s colour palette. If your palette’s blue is very light (as it is in some default configurations), white text on top of it can be difficult to read.There are several ways to fix this:
  • Run p10k configure and choose a different prompt style.
  • Change your terminal’s colour palette (e.g., switch to Tango Dark or Solarized Dark, or redefine just the blue entry).
  • Adjust the directory colours directly in ~/.p10k.zsh by changing POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_BACKGROUND, POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_FOREGROUND, POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_SHORTENED_FOREGROUND, POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_ANCHOR_FOREGROUND, and/or POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_ANCHOR_BOLD to values that produce better contrast in your terminal.

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