The purpose of a .bashrc file is to provide a place where you can set up variables, functions and aliases, define your (PS1) prompt and define other settings that you want to use every starttime you open a new terminal window.
YouA super minimal one might have the following:
export CLICOLOR=1 export LANG="en_US.UTF-8" alias cp="cp -i" alias ls="ls --color=auto" export PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ " export EDITOR="vim" That's all you really know to get started
Here's the "overkill" version, useful for experienced developers:
An experienced developer will often have a lot more.
You can see mine here (pic with syntax highlighting):
This also makes it easier to use the entire file immediately on a new machine without having issues that affect opening a new terminal window.
REMINDER - if you change your .bashrc, be sure to start a new terminal window to make sure it works BEFORE rebooting (best practice - do it immediately after the change). If you ever mess up your .bashrc and reboot YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO LOGIN! Personally I also create a second 'admin' user on personal machines so that, in such an emergency (broken login), I can log into that and use then use sudo to fix my other login .bashrc file.
