> [...] totally overwhelms any aesthetic considerations of disliking
> prompts taking up a line (or insisting on a clear line before it -- I
> don’t understand why you would suggest such a straw man, which is not
> what I was advocating). 

I totally understand what you're saying, but I hardly ever copy and
paste between terminals so it's just not an issue to me and then
my preference for a compact prompt and little whitespace prevails.

I'll give you that the clear line thing is personal and won't
necessarily apply to others. The "you'll want to" was misplaced.

> At least the 300 baud modem gave you time to ponder over those few lines
> before they scrolled off the screen. In that scenario, lines of text
> were precious, although the HP terminals charge by characters, not
> lines. But I don’t think anybody in their right mind uses terminals like
> that any more. 

They charged per character? That's fascinating.

I'm too young to have worked with teletypes or terminals but to
experience what working over a slower connection would be like I wrote
a small pty program that throttles stdin and stdout to a given baud
rate:

https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle

It's probably nothing like the real thing but I found it interesting to
experience adapting to a slow terminal and to see things like pagers
update the screen step by step.