Re: shouldn't prompt printing be smarter?

[Chet Ramey]

Fran Litterio wrote:
>> Also, creating an "option" to decide which behaviour should be followed
>> (current one or the one I propose) would make everyone happy
> 
> It should be possible to code a value for PROMPT_COMMAND that sends
> the cursor position report escape sequence (for xterm this is
> "\033[6n"), learn the position of the cursor, and conditionally output
> a newline if the cursor is not in column 1.
> 
> Some quick experimentation shows that this sequence of commands will
> do just that:

This is the right approach.  In general, it's not possible for readline
to do this in a terminal-independent way -- termcap and terminfo do not
provide the appropriate capability.  If you want to do this, you will
have to decide yourself which terminals to support.

Chet
-- 
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Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/