On the topic of prompts

[DeWitt Clinton <dewitt@siva.tripod.com>]

Hi,

I've been lurking here for a while, and while I don't take full advantage
of everything zsh offers, I am still a strong supporter.

I just recently switched to a two line prompt (embedding a literal newline
works fine for me) and I have a question.  I used to use rprompt to place
the time on the right hand side.  Now I would like the time to be right
justified on the first line of the prompt.  So it would look something
like:

- history hostname username cwd date          time -
%

Simply using rprompt would give me:

- history hostname username cwd date                             
%                                             time -

Since there is probably no way to justify a section of the prompt, perhaps
there is a way to tell rprompt to write to the line just above using
control characters?  Just wondering...

Also, is there a way to pad the variables with spaces?  If so, that would 
solve this problem entirely.

While I am thinking about it, what I am really looking for is a status bar
that would just sit at the top of the screen and hold certain useful
information.  Anyone know of how to achieve this?

-DeWitt

DeWitt Clinton                                       dewitt@siva.tripod.com
(413) 458-2265 at Tripod, Inc.                       (413) 458-2107 at home.