Re: bash completion with colour hints

[Simon Oosthoek <soosthoek@nieuwland.nl>]

On 09/27/2012 10:53 AM, Michael J Gruber wrote:

>
>  From trying myself, I'm convinced that you need a clever combination of
> PROMPT_COMMAND and PS1 to make this work. Setting PS1 in PROMPT_COMMAND
> is probably a no-go because that makes it difficult to customize PS1. I
> have something in the works which reproduces the current prompt but need
> to clean it up further. The actual coloring would require setting a lot
> of variables which communicate data from PROMPT_COMMAND to PS1, and I
> actually don't like that.
>
> An alternative approach would be:
>
> - Tell users to activate git prompt by doing something like
>
> PROMPT_COMMAND='__git_prompt "[\u@\h \W (%s)]\$ '
>
> rather than the current
>
> PS1='[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")]\$ '
>
> - set PS1 from __git_prompt
>
> I'm not sure about the performance implications of re-setting PS1 on
> (before) each prompt invocation, though. Would that be OK?

After some research, I completely agree with your assessment!

I don't think the performance issue is that big and it's the only way to 
get the colors in there without messing up word wrapping.

I'm afraid that either this will need a new function just to get the 
coloring hints or that it will break the usage of __git_ps1 entirely (if 
you'd require the user to use it as PROMPT_COMMAND instead of via PS1)

And I suppose this will not be compatible with zsh?

/Simon

PS, I'd rather have colours with wrapping issues, than no colour hints. 
But I realise this has to be fixed before inclusion into the main tree.