SOLVED: gnome-terminal long bash lines do not edit correctly

[captwiggum]

When I have long commnad lines that wrap, the line wraps to the beginning of the same line, rather than the next line. Similarly, when up-arrow'ing to previous long command lines, it prints the first half of the long line in place, then the next half on the previous line, rather than the next line. So and up-down-up-down arrow sequence steps the command line upward on my screen.

This happens with:
-both "set -o vi" and the default bash edit "set -o emacs"
-both TERM=xterm and TERM=vt220
-both gnome-terminal and rxvt (guess its not gnome-terminal specific)

I'm running the most current "stable make world" as of Apr-30. Gnome-terminal 2.16.1, xorg 7.2, etc. and a vanilla 2.6.20.7 kernel, on an x86, Dell Latitude D620 laptop.

Any ideas? Any help greatly appreciated.

[di1bert]

Hi captwiggum

I've done a little googling and it seems to be a problem with the PS1 variable.
Do you have a custom prompt ? Also what shell are you using ?

To check this do the following:

[captwiggum]

Thanks di1bert! That link did not work for me in the literal sense, but the subject of discussion put me on the right track.

Basically, according to 'man bash', any non-printable characters in the prompt, such as escape sequences, must be enclosed within "\[" and "\]", with those backslashes included. Again, RTFM was the answer.

For example, my particular problem prompt, was this:

export PS1='\h:\033[1m\u\033[0m:\w:\$ '

The issue was that it looked fine and appeared to work. But long lines would not edit nice, as described above. The solution prompt was this:

export PS1='\h:\[\033[1m\]\u\[\033[0m\]:\w:\$ '

And it looks the same, but long lines now edit correctly!

Hope this helps others. Thanks again di1bert for taking the time to help. Rock on Gentoo!

[creidiki]

interesting, did you report this to b.g.o?

edit: done it myself
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