Prehistory
Once I read somewhere that it's possible to add some colours to your shell's
(bash in my case) prompt using escape sequences. I thought that it will
greatly decrease time one spend finding the beginning of a command that was just
run. Prompt colouring is also useful to distinguish between root and regular
user prompt. So after some experiments with echo command, I added this line
to my ~/.bashrc file:
# green command prompt
export PS1="\033[32m[\\w]\\$ \033[0m"
And this to /root/.bashrc:
# red command prompt
export PS1="\033[31m[\\w]\\$ \033[0m"
I liked it a lot, but after some time noticed strange issues with long command lines. I tried to live with it, but after quite long period of time removed the colouring, since it made using long commands a hell.
Nowadays
All described above was a lot time ago, until suddenly I saw a link to
this page in one of comments on HabraHabr. And now I finally know
how to add colours to bash prompt not having that weird behaviour with long
command lines. One just needs to enclose all non-printable characters in
\[ and \], so that bash wont count them as part of prompt string. Now my
.bashrc files contain this:
# green command prompt
export PS1="\\[\033[32m\\][\\w]\\$ \\[\033[0m\\]"
And this to /root/.bashrc:
# red command prompt
export PS1="\\[\033[31m\\][\\w]\\$ \\[\033[0m\\]"
I think no one will argue that this makes work in terminal a bit nicer.