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Comment by JulianWasTaken | Hacker News Reader

Oh, boy, props for getting this working, but this looks really distracting to actually use as a prompt for my tastes.

Yeah, I also have one that fixes the prompt to the top so you only see a small '$' at the current line, but it messes up the terminal history.

By messes up terminal history do you mean when you push up in terminal the previous lines that show up are rendered badly or that your actual history is effected in some way?

I used the ANSI control codes for moving the cursor, which seems to overwrite previous lines. Not sure if there's another way to achieve that without overwriting lines though.

Maybe use \033[L (ANSI for insert-line).

Edit: If I understand what you're doing, then maybe you can use this:

    tput ind; tput home; tput il1; echo -n "header"; tput el; tput cup $LINES 0

Use "man terminfo" to lookup things like "il1" and use "infocmp" to see what they translate to in your terminal.

I too prefer just PS1='$ ', I want the cursor to be the same distance from the margin every time, to have maximum length for typing without wrapping, and the ability to put in a few separator lines between command output by just tapping Return.

However, for your problem, have you considered the terminal's title instead of the top line of the tty? printf '\033]0;foo\007'

Hmm, that wouldn't let me keep the colors etc. I'm on iTerm btw, perhaps you mean the title in a screen/tmux session?

No, I meant the window's furniture so no colours. I agree, a tty-wrapper, like tmux, would provide another option. I don't suppose there are terminals generally about where `tput hs' is true. Have you considered using the end of the prompt line for status, returning to the left for the "$ ", and being happy to do readline's redraw-current-line if you don't like the overwrite should you reach that far?

Mine has a bunch of info, then a newline, then ' $'. Being able to see the current git branch is just too useful to drop, but I moving random distances out from the margin between commands.

How do you make your $ character appear smaller than usual?

I didn't do anything- maybe it's smaller in Monaco?

You said that you used "a small '$'". How's it any smaller than usual?

Oh, sorry about that. I just meant that it has only a $ sign which makes it small.

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