Re: Good documentation about literal escape sequences in prompt?

["Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 12,  1:41am, Juhapekka Tolvanen wrote:
} Subject: Good documentation about literal escape sequences in prompt?
}
} %{...%}
}         Include a string as a literal escape sequence. The
}         string within the braces should not change the cursor
}         position. Brace pairs can nest.
} 
} Hey, come on! Do you really think that is enough? Why don't you provide some
} good examples? I know you can do it better!

It's an acknowledged problem that the docs need more examples.  Care to
provide any?

} For example this does not work:
} 
} PS1="%{\e[1;31m%}$PS1%{\e[1m%}"
         ^^^^^^^^
The doc says LITERAL escape sequence; the substring \e is not LITERALLY the
character with ASCII value decimal-27.  What other part of the doc gave you
the idea that prompting would replace \e with something else?

} Color-codes were found from /usr/share/zsh/functions/colors

Well, then.  What you want to do is (1) run that function `colors' to set
up the $fg_bold array, etc., and then (2) set your prompt like this:

PS1="%{$fg_bold[red]%}$PS1%{$reset_color%}"

} I tried to understand other files in /usr/share/zsh/functions, like _prompt
} and promptinit but even it was the real pain in the ass.

It's also true that there's no doc for the prompts stuff yet.  You type

autoload -U promptinit
promptinit

And then you can get a little bit of help from `prompt -h'.

-- 
Bart Schaefer                                 Brass Lantern Enterprises
http://www.well.com/user/barts              http://www.brasslantern.com