Why is this bash prompt acting strangely/disappearing, and how do I fix it (OS X)?

Question

I admit that I use a somewhat long-winded bash prompt:

--(username)-(Wed April 01|12:00:00)--(~ $

Recently, I got the bright idea to change

Answer 1

It sounds like this should solve your problem.

This seems to work for me*:

export PS1='--(\[\e[$((32-${?}))m\]\u\[\e[0m\])-(\[\e[$((32-${?}))m\]\d\[\e[0m\]|\[\e[$((32-${?}))m\]\T\[\e[0m\])--(\[\e[$((32-${?}))m\]\w\[\e[0m\] \$ '

* well, really export PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ ' works for me

To quote the linked post, the answer lies in adding \[ and \] around all of your color sequences in your PS1 declaration:

Before I had the following value for PS1:

'\e[0;34m\h:\w [!]\$\e[0m '

which gave me a nice blue prompt of the following form

hostname:working-directory [command-number]$

However, I had the same line-wrapping problem you did. The fix was to insert \[ and \] around the ANSI escapes so that the shell knows not to include them in the line wrapping calculation. This results in the following value for PS1:

'\[\e[0;34m\]\h:\w [!]\$\[\e[m\] '