Re: Add colors to the prompt for status indicators

Sorry for the delayed response to this one - I'm afraid it's the usual work excuse :)

Non-printing characters need to be surrounded by \[ and \] for bash to calculate line lengths correctly. So far as I can tell, this has to be in PS1 itself - bash doesn't recognise it if it's included in a script.

To see the problem, do this:

OLD_PS1="$PS1" PS1="\033[0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0m>"

Then hold down any key - you should see some weird line-wrapping behaviour a little way before the edge of your terminal. To get your old terminal back:

PS1="$OLD_PS1"

To see what happens when the "\[" characters are embedded in a script:

foo() {
 echo -e "\[\033[;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0m\]"
}
PS1='$(foo)>'

The "\[" and "\]" are represented literally in your terminal, and the line-wrapping still occurs.

It's possible to work around this for a whole script:

foo() {
 echo -e "\033[;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0m"
}
PS1='\[$(foo)'\]>'

As a fan of colourful prompts, I'd be very happy if you found a way around this for parts of a script. But as a fan of fast prompts, I'd prefer not to call __git_ps1 more than once :)

	- Andrew