Re: %l prompt expansion change

[Andrej Borsenkow <Andrej.Borsenkow@mow.siemens.ru>]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> }
> } Well, mostly aesthetic considerations. It is `0' om /dev/tty0 and pts/3 or
> } term/4 somewhere else. Also, ps usually shows tty line as base name sans
> } /dev/. And not every Unix is Linux yet to treat /dev/tty* specially.
>
> The treatment of /dev/tty* has nothing to do with Linux, and everything
> to do with old BSD around 4.2, where real TTYs were named /dev/ttyt* and
> PTYs were named /dev/ttyp*, and the intent was to have %l expand to e.g.
> "t9" or "p9".  The idea of logging in on a real system console with a
> /dev/tty<-> name probably never occurred to PF -- unix machines were
> almost exclusively time-sharing when this code was first written.
>
> I can almost guarantee that PF never expected %l to expand to include an
> entire directory name like "pts/" or "term/".  Prompts are intended to be
> extremely concise, to maximize editing space.  That's why RPROMPT came to
> exist: a prompt that could be verbose but would get out of the way when
> your command line got long.
>

It already expands to term/* if tty is /dev/term/*. So, the point of my
patch was to eliminate inconsistency. It is hard to me (sorry) to remember
that {0} is tty0 when most of the time I have {pts/3} or like.


> } I asked if somebody was against this change.
>
> Well, we asked if anybody was against the HIST_NO_STORE change, too, and
> now Vincent is complaining about it.  Probably we should ask these kinds
> of questions on zsh-users (without including the proposed patch).
>

But Clint is on zsh-workers list. No offence intended.

-andrej