Mail Archives: cygwin/2001/07/03/21:18:34
Sandeep,
That's overkill!
Use the feature that's there to prevent this miscounting. Namely, \[
(that's backslash and left bracket, not escape) to open a non-printing
sub-sequence of the promt and \] (likewise, bacslash right bracket) to
close the non-printing sub-sequence.
See section 7.10 of the BASH manual "Controlling the Prompt" (7.10 or
thereabouts, i.e.--this is the section an old printed version I use).
Randall Schulz
At 16:08 2001-07-03, Sandeep Tamhankar wrote:
>I saw this too when I moved to rxvt. The problem is that when you specify
>escape characters in your PS1 (primary prompt) bad things like this
>happen. By default when you start up Cygwin, your PS1 is set to show the
>current directory in your window title bar and your username (possibly
>with host but I can't remember for certain) as your actual prompt in
>green. Even in the standard Windows console-app window, I get all sorts
>of problems when I have multi-screenline commands and start doing Ctrl-a
>and Ctrl-e. I ended up living with it for a while, but once I started
>using rxvt (which exploits the cr or cr/lf issue you mention), my only
>choices were to
>
>1. Remove all escape characters from PS1 and make my cwd be at the
>beginning of my prompt. (Annoying since some paths can be quite long.)
>2. Bite the bullet and build zsh, which is the shell I love anyway but was
>otherwise too lazy to build in the past.
>
>I chose a combination of the two. Zsh lets me have a right-side prompt,
>so that my cwd shows up on the right while my machine-name shows up on the
>left. If I start typing a command that requires a lot of space, the right
>side prompt goes away for that line as soon as I touch it's first
>character. Plus I could specify that I only want to see the last n
>directories in my cwd (a feature that I loved in tcsh, but which would be
>far more painful to produce in bash).
>
>Ok, I don't want to start a "favorite-shell" war, so I'll stop now. Bottom
>line: there is something wrong with the way...something renders the
>characters in the window that's screwed up and has been for a while (at
>least on my W2k machine).
>
>-Sandeep
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