Comments on: Linux Terminal tip – avoid confusion http://egoh.com/2006/10/16/terminal-tip-avoid-confusion/ Blog of Eric Goh, Technology Entrepreneur, Early Adopter, Product Management Professional Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:41:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Andy Nguyen http://egoh.com/2006/10/16/terminal-tip-avoid-confusion/comment-page-1/#comment-4289 Andy Nguyen Sat, 11 Apr 2009 01:32:02 +0000 http://www.egoh.com/2006/10/16/terminal-tip-avoid-confusion/#comment-4289 Or, if like me, you have a hard time using both white-on-black and black-on-white windows, use different colors of (bash) prompt for different hosts. export PS1="\[^[[47m\] `hostname` \w \[^[[0m\]\[^[[46m\]\!>\[^[[0m\] " ^[[47m (ESC [ 4 7 m) and ^[[46m change the color of displayed characters; ^[[0m changes it back to no color. ^[[47;46m will turn on BOTH "colors" of 46 and 47, which is useful for setting a "reverse video" and a color at the same time for displayed characters. \! is the number of the command in the command line history. \w is the current working directory. The \[ and \] tells bash not to get confused by the zero-width "characters" like ^[ in the prompt string. To see that colors my "terminal" is capable of rendering, I usually do: i=1 while [ $i -lt 255 ]; do echo "^[[${i}m ---- $i ---- ^[[0m"; ((i++)); done where "^[" is the ESC character. In "vi", you would input that as ^V^[. Or, if like me, you have a hard time using both white-on-black and black-on-white windows, use different colors of (bash) prompt for different hosts.

export PS1=”\[^[[47m\] `hostname` \w \[^[[0m\]\[^[[46m\]\!>\[^[[0m\] ”

^[[47m (ESC [ 4 7 m) and ^[[46m change the color of displayed characters; ^[[0m changes it back to no color.
^[[47;46m will turn on BOTH "colors" of 46 and 47, which is useful for setting a "reverse video" and a color at the same time for displayed characters.

\! is the number of the command in the command line history.

\w is the current working directory.

The \[ and \] tells bash not to get confused by the zero-width “characters” like ^[ in the prompt string.

To see that colors my "terminal" is capable of rendering, I usually do:

i=1
while [ $i -lt 255 ]; do echo “^[[${i}m —- $i —- ^[[0m”; ((i++)); done

where “^[” is the ESC character. In “vi”, you would input that as ^V^[.

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