Escape colour codes

[Matthew Woehlke]

Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> lftp and yafc show a wrong prompt in the following terminals: cmd, 4nt, 
>> console and far manager. Basically each coloured part of the prompt is 
>> surrounded by two "funny faces" - the first is white and the second has 
>> the desired colour.

I don't know what these are. Are they non-Cygwin applications that are 
looking at the environment variable 'PS1'? Cygwin apps (e.g. 'printf') 
should cope with escapes correctly even in Windows consoles (otherwise 
even bash would not work).

> Obvioulsy all Windows terminals can't interpret those "non-visible 
> characters" (or they don't ignore them like they should or readline 
> doesn't "eat" them like it should).
> 
> Where is the culprit here? Cygwin readline not correctly interacting 
> with non Cygwin terminals? Windows terminals not understanding common 
> readline(?) escape characters?

Windows consoles don't understand escapes, period. Also AFAIK nothing 
except readline understands \[ and \]. But Cygwin understands escapes so 
Cygwin applications should work even in a Windows console.

> Is there a way to solve the issue?

Don't use escapes in non-Cygwin programs.

-- 
Matthew
Obscurity: +5


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