colors & tab completion

colors & tab completion

[Daniel Lyons]

Hi everyone,

I just recently decided to try and make that color prompt I always
wanted, so I eventually came up with this setup (after parsing
/usr/local/share/zsh/3.1.9/colors):

PROMPT="${fg[magenta]}%n${fg[white]}@${fg[green]}%m ${fg[blue]}%C \
${fg[white]}%(#.=>.->) "

this clearly makes this format: "username@host directory -> " with
the username magenta, the host green, and the directory blue.  the
-> becomes => when logged in as root.

anyway, that all works fine.  the problem is that when one presses
tab multiple times to activate automenu, this is what gets
displayed:

"username@host directory -> filename.ext1                     ext2"

where the huge gap appears to be about equal to the length of the
color prompt.

I tried doing this with zsh -f, in case it was my config file, and
it wasn't.  I'm running OpenBSD 2.9 on my personal system, but I
have the same problem on the university computers running a
Slackware variant.  Same problem with zsh versions 3.1.9 and 4.0.2.

any help would be greatly appreciated!  Thank you

Daniel

RE: colors & tab completion

[Borsenkow Andrej]

> 
> PROMPT="${fg[magenta]}%n${fg[white]}@${fg[green]}%m ${fg[blue]}%C \
> ${fg[white]}%(#.=>.->) "
...
> anyway, that all works fine.  the problem is that when one presses
> tab multiple times to activate automenu, this is what gets
> displayed:
> 
> "username@host directory -> filename.ext1                     ext2"
> 




You need to tell zsh that these are escapes (and not counted in prompt
length calculation):

%{...%}
     Include a string as a literal escape sequence.  The string within
     the braces should not change the cursor position.  Brace pairs can
     nest.

i.e. you need

PROMPT="%{${fg[magenta]}%}...

-andrej