Adding ANSI color escape sequences to a bash prompt results in bad cursor position when recalling/editing commands

Question

If I set my command prompt like:

export PS1=\'\\033[0;33m[\\u@\\h \\w]\\$ \\033[00m\'

The color of the prompt will be yellow and everything

Answer 1

You need to enclose the non-printing characters in \[ ... \] so that bash knows to ignore them when computing the length of the prompt:

export PS1='\[\033[0;33m\][\u@\h \w]\$ \[\033[00m\]'