Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 33, Issue 7

[Don Hopkins <don@donhopkins.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2630 bytes --]

I strongly dislike something as trivial as a prompt taking up my TIME and ATTENTION. I have room for many more lines in my terminal emulator and emacs shell window than I have time and attention or patience for carefully pointing and clicking and editing out prompts (or even talking about half-assed kludges when there’s a simple obvious solution to the problem), and much better things to do with my time and energy. 

To me, there is virtually no cost to having an extra line in my terminal or shell window, while the repeated cost of all the time and effort I have to waste working around the clutter of the prompt, integrated over the hundreds of times per day I use the command line, 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’m not trying to paint the Mona Lisa in ASCII art, I’m simply trying to save time and effort. 

What’s the downside to the prompt taking up a full line (and as a result, the command taking up a whole line without being polluted with a prompt), other than strongly disliking things you’re not used to? Is your terminal emulator configured to only remember 24 lines? And why are you so averse to clutter, yet have no problem with the prompt cluttering up your input, which causes real non-aesthetic problems? 

I used to use a shitty HP 2640 terminal in high school that only had a half a page of screen memory (but didn’t store the spaces at the end of the lines, so you could fit 12 80-character lines on the screen, or 24 40-character lines), so if you printed out long lines, it would start scrolling before there was a full screen of text. 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. 

-Don


> On 8 Aug 2018, at 14:32, Sijmen J. Mulder <ik@sjmulder.nl> wrote:
> 
> > Decades ago I made my prompt simply end with a newline, which perfectly
> > and cleanly solves the problem of making it easy to copy and paste a
> > whole line
>  
> I never considered setting a copy/paste-friendly prompt but I strongly
> dislike prompts taking up a line. Admittedly it's nice to have some room
> for extra information but then you'll want a clear line above it too for
> visual structure and that's all just too much clutter for me.


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4515 bytes --]