[OS X TeX] path before prompt

[Roussanka Loukanova]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Herbert Schulz wrote:

>
> On Feb 18, 2008, at 8:20 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
>> Le 18 févr. 08 à 15:02, Roussanka Loukanova a écrit :
>> 
>> > Accept my apology for this question, but which is the good choice and 
>> > why? I guess the default set up (i.e., 'W') should have some good 
>> > rationality behind.
>> 
>> The old choice used to put the whole path to the current directory 
>> (starting from ~) before the prompt. As a result, this path occupied most 
>> of the current line in the Terminal window (if there was more than 3 levels 
>> say in the path) and any text typed after the prompt was partly superposed 
>> on this path, making it undecipherable and unusable for copy/paste.
>> 
>> In order to avoid that, you needed to make the Terminal window as wide as 
>> possible which was not always an option on small screens. It would have 
>> been better to have the supplementary text flowed to the next line instead 
>> of being superposed at the beginning of the current line, but if there was 
>> an option for that I have no idea what it was.
>> 
>> Now with Leopard this nonsense is at last gone!
>> 
>> Bruno Voisin
>
>
> Howdy,
>
> I'm not sure were the setting is but the line wraps properly in Terminal on 
> my system.

I think, as I recall, that you are still under 10.4, where the default is 
to have a prompt showing the entire path down to the current directory, 
i.e., something like:

XYZs-computer:~/Documents/papers/math220 xyz$

This is why, under 10.4 one doesn't need to reset the default prompt, if 
they like it as it is. But is seems that under 10.5 the default is to hide 
the path, and I am guessing, we will have just a very short prompt, 
with something like this:

$

I am not sure which is the good placement for re-setting the prompt, in 
.bashrc or in .bash_profile, and which is the best line of code in either 
of these dot files, esp under Leopard.

Roussanka

>
> Good Luck,
>
> Herb Schulz
> (herbs at wideopenwest.com)