Prompts with ANSI escape sequences



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Posted by: stak
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Posted on: 2014-10-19 21:35:15

Tip of the day: If your shell uses the readline library (e.g. bash), and you have ANSI escape sequences in your prompt, you should surround the ANSI escape sequences with \001 and \002 so that readline knows they are "invisible characters". If you don't, readline can end up mis-positioning your cursor and generally screwing up the display.

For example, I used to have this in my bashrc file:

export PS1='\u@\033[01;31m\h\033[m \W$ '

and that caused problems if for example I had a long command and used ctrl+a to get to the start of it.

Now I have this:

export PS1='\u@\001\033[01;31m\002\h\001\033[m\002 \W$ '

and all is well.

The \001 and \002 are defined as RL_PROMPT_START_IGNORE and RL_PROMPT_END_IGNORE in readline.h.

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