Re: [gentoo-user] Globally Disable Prompt Formatting, In All Programs Everywhere For All Time

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/16/2018 03:11 PM, R0b0t1 wrote:
> Today, I feel the need to ask about how to Globally Disable Prompt
> Formatting, In All Programs Everywhere For All Time.

I'm not aware of a universal way to disable prompt formatting.

Are you talking specifically about the shell prompt?

What other things are using prompt formatting?  (I've added it to a few 
things via rlwrap, but I doubt that's the case here.)

> Is the only way to find every program that generates escape sequences
> and disable it? What about kernel messages during boot?

I want to say that things should be leveraging TERMCAP and the TERM 
environment variable.  However, I don't think /any/ of the things that 
I've read about (shell) prompt formatting have taken TERMCAP into 
account.  Instead they all seem to echo raw vt100 escape codes directly.

I don't even know how to pass through something like TERMCAP to leverage 
the TERM environment variable setting.

I don't know if it's your case or not, but if you are talking about the 
shell's PROMPT blindly echoing escape characters and impacting various 
terminal emulators that you're using, I think the shell itself is the 
first (and likely only) place to look.

I have personally run into this problem and solved it differently.  I 
configure a fairly fancy prompt (both left and right in Zsh).  But I do 
so conditionally based on what the answer back value is.  Part of my 
shell's init scripts query the answer back and expect specific values. 
If those values aren't seen, then a very simple prompt (without any 
escape codes) is used.

This means that I must configure my terminal (emulators) to reply with 
something (usually the host name) and then tweak my init script to match 
the host name as a known safe place for my fancy prompt.

I doubt that this directly answers your question, nor do I know if it 
helps or not.  Hopefully it gives you food for thought.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die