The :;
shell prompt trick
For years, I've had a somewhat unusual shell prompt. It looks like this:
: <host> ;
(where <host>
is the hostname of the current machine.)
Putting the hostname in your prompt is pretty ordinary, but what's
the other stuff? These days, a more typical shell prompt is something
like 'cks@newman:~$
', to quote a Debian example. (And many
people use more elaborate prompts, such as Jamie Zawinksi's.)
The trick here is that the :
and ;
turn my prompt into a valid shell
command that does nothing. This makes cutting and pasting previous
commands in things like xterm
much easier, since I don't have to
carefully get just the command while avoiding the prompt. (In xterm
it's just a quick triple click, but then xterm
is very good at this.)
(In practice I am sufficiently neurotically neat that I select just the
command, because seeing a doubled prompt looks wrong. This might be
different if my prompt was just ':;
', but I need the host name in it
to keep things straight.)
This trick is not original to me; I believe I got it from observing Geoff Collyer, many years ago.
Sidebar: xterm
's double-click selections
One reason I don't use this more is that xterm
's double-click
selection mode makes selecting most things pretty fast anyways.
For those who aren't aware of it, when you start a selection by
double-clicking instead of single-clicking, xterm
grows the selection
by words instead of characters. (Try it; it's more intuitive than I
make it sound.)
Embarrassingly, I spent years using xterm
before I found out about
this. Now I use it all the time, and hardly ever have to select by
characters.
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