OS X Terminal text stacking on top of itself

Question

I'm encountering a strange issue in the Terminal app in Mac OS X Lion. When I enter in a long line of text that should wrap to the next line when it reaches the edge of the Terminal window, it continues to type on top of the text from the line above it.

Here are some screenshots to help illustrate the issue:

Before my text reaches the window edge:

After the text reaches the window edge:

I've also supplied screenshots of my text and window settings in case those might be helpful.

Text settings:

Window settings:

Thanks in advance for any assistance offered. I've had this issue for a while and just never got around to it. It's now really becoming a pain in the ass when I get into things that require big grep commands and long path names.

Answer 1

PS1 environment variable determines what shell's prompt will look like. man bash gives full documentation on it. (There are actually several of them, for different modes).

There are number of files that may be setting it, usually one of ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc, /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc.

If you're going to have color codes or other control sequences inside it, you must wrap them with \[ and \] properly (and NOT wrap normal text), otherwise line editing may become messed up like in your case. I suggest resetting PS1 to the default value then carefully adding coloring back item by item.

For example:

PS1='\[\033[1m\033[32m\]\u@\h \w\[\033[0m\]\$ '
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^            ^^^^^^^

Coloring commands are underlined. Note how they are surrounded with \[ \].

Answer 2

I have the same problem, i found if you change

Advanced > Emulation > Declare terminal as: ANSI.

This solves colored PS1 problem. With Mac Terminal

BUT creates a strange behavior: I found a solution to my problem with @koiyu answer.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/37001/strange-behavior-in-terminal-with-custom-bash-profile/37036#37036

Answer 3

I used to have the same issue due to incorrectly using color codes. Here is my PS1 which solved the issue. Also if you use GIT, then this will be also helpful to show git branch you are working on and if your working tree is dirty or not. Put this in your .profile or .bash_profile

# Git branch in prompt.
parse_git_branch() {
    git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/'
}

parse_git_dirty() {
    st=$(git status 2>/dev/null | tail -n 1)
    if [[ $st == "" ]]; then
        echo ''
    elif [[ $st == "nothing to commit (working directory clean)" ]]; then
        echo ''
    elif [[ $st == 'nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)' ]]; then
        echo '?'
    else
        echo '*'
    fi
}

# coloring the terminal comman line
SB_GREEN="\[\033[1;32m\]"
SB_BLUE="\[\033[1;34m\]"
SB_RED="\[\033[1;31m\]"
SB_NOCOLOR="\[\033[0m\]"
export PS1="$SB_GREEN\u@\h$SB_NOCOLOR: $SB_BLUE\w$SB_GREEN\$(parse_git_branch)$SB_RED\$(parse_git_dirty)$SB_NOCOLOR $ "

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

With the guidance of hamstergene I was able to figure out how to make it play nice. Using this Geek Stuff guide and this It's Me Tommy tutorial, I was able to define how I wanted my PS1 text to display. Changing this to something much more simplified eliminated the weird overlapping text issue I was running into.

Before:

After:

I simply edited my .bash_profile and added the following line:

export PS1="[\u@\h] > ";

Then I went and changed the window colors for good measure because I can.

Answer 5

The original issue was that there was a new line in the PS1 (FYI for anybody running into this)

Typically its improperly escaped color codes, but if its not that its that you have a new line in your ps1

Answer 6

As others have said, you have to properly wrap your color commands in escaped square brackets. However, for me, this makes the string really, really confusing to look at!

As such, here's a trick I use to always get it right and also make it much more readable.

I first create a shell function called setColor like so...

setColor(){
    echo "\[\033[${1}m\]"
}

Then I use it like this...

PS1="$(setColor 92)\u$(setColor 37):$(setColor 96)\w $(setColor)\$ "

That's the same as writing this...

\[\033[92m\]\u\[\033[37m\]:\[\033[96m\]\w \[\033[m\]$

...but as you can see, the former is much clearer and also guarantees everything's properly escaped.

Note, you can specify multiple colors too by using the ; character. The only thing is you have to explicitly escape it, so 92;41 becomes 92\;41, like so...

PS1="$(setColor 92\;41)\u$(setColor 37):$(setColor 96)\w $(setColor)\$ "

Again, still easier to read than this...

\[\033[92;41m\]\u\[\033[37m\]:\[\033[96m\]\w \[\033[m\]$

You can take this a step further by defining constants for the colors, or even 'wrapper' functions with the color names you use most, so you can write this...

PS1="$(setRed)\u$(setBlue):$(setGreen)\w $(resetColor)\$ "

Hope this helps!