Stop characters from being wrapped to the beginning of the line

[Casper-Guo]

My terminal wraps a line that exceeds the character limit to the beginning of the same line and obfuscate the prompt:

What are the settings needed to prevent this and wrap to the next line (or expand per line character limit) instead?

[DHowett]

This looks like an issue with your shell. Can you share your custom PS1?

[Casper-Guo]

This is the part of my .bashrc that implements the custom PS1

function colorized_prompt {
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        printf "\e[31m$\e[m"
    else
        printf "\e[32m$\e[m"
    fi
}

function git_branch {
    git status 2>/dev/null | grep 'On branch' | sed 's/On branch / => /'
}

export PS1="\e[36m[\d \t]\e[m \e[32m\u\e[m\e[33m@\e[m\e[31m\h:\e[m\e[36m\w\e[m \$(colorized_prompt)\e[33m\$(git_branch)\e[m "

[DHowett]

Thanks!

Alright, so, one of the important things in a bash prompt is to enclose the non-printable escape sequences in \[ and \]. That way, bash doesn't consider them when it measures how long the prompt is.

Try this out! It may help, or it may (depending on how well I remember bash...) break terribly.

function colorize_prompt {
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        printf "\e[31m"
    else
        printf "\e[32m"
    fi
}

function git_branch {
    git status 2>/dev/null | grep 'On branch' | sed 's/On branch / => /'
}

export PS1="\[\e[36m\][\d \t]\[\e[m\] \[\e[32m\]\u\[\e[m\e[33m\]@\[\e[m\e[31m\]\h:\[\e[m\e[36m\]\w\[\e[m\] \[\$(colorize_prompt)\]$\[\em\e[33m\]\$(git_branch)\[\e[m\] "

Here's what I did:

• Every place there was a \e...m I put \[ before and \] after it.
• I couldn't do that for colorized_prompt because emitting the prompt escape wrapping tokens \[ and \] inside a called function gets weird (and I forgot how to do it), so I made it only emit the color SGR and then wrapped the function call in \[ and \]. The $ from inside colorize went outside the function call (e.g. \[\$(colorize_prompt)\] plus $ plus \[\e[m\])

There's a little more line noise, but I can now edit wrapped commands and wrap commands properly!

[Casper-Guo]

Thanks, work as expected!

A tangential question is why are the brackets mismatched when specifying SGR such as \e[33m\]@\[\e[m? It seems like the last bracket is never closed

[DHowett]

Ah! When there were two escapes next to eachother, I just wrapped them up in the same \[ \] pair: