I guess that R does not know about ANSI sequences, and it calculates the width of the prompt including the characters in the sequences. You cannot do much about this, except maybe use a prompt that has two lines. You can put the colored text and whatever you like in the first line, and the second line can be non-ANSI.
Note that this works in the terminal, but does not work in RStudio. RStudio does not support multi-line prompt currently. Maybe this is also interesting for you, if you want a dynamic R prompt: https://github.com/gaborcsardi/prompt#readme (Self-ad, sorry.) Gabor On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 8:59 AM, Hugo Raguet <hugo.rag...@centraliens.net> wrote: > When R is run interactively in a terminal which supports colors, it is > possible to use ANSI escape sequences in order to put colors in the prompt, > such as > > options(prompt = "\033[0;31mThis is red\033[0m> ") > > Unfortunately, something goes wrong because for long command lines, the > line continuation override the prompt instead of being written in the next > line. The problem gets worse when using several colors, because somehow > each escape sequence "takes up some space" in the command line, *up to the > point that the end of the prompt might overwrite the beginning*. On my > configuration this happens with for instance > > options(prompt = paste("\033[0;31m With \033[0;32m multiple", > "\033[0;33m colors \033[0;34m this", > "\033[0;35m gets \033[0;36m really", > "\033[0;37m wrong! \033[0m")) > > Why is it so? Is there a workaround? > > PS: This rather old post seems related > > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Xterm-escape-sequences-in- > Prompt-td906375.html > > PPS: I posted this question on [R] section of stack overflow > > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42072092/buggy-ansi- > escape-sequences-in-r-prompt > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
