Updates
- June 12, 2018 - applied 4.3 patches 47 and 48 and rebased
- July 26, 2016 - rebased onto bash 4.3.46 master
This is a patched version of bash 4.3.48 that adds support for custom prompt mode indicators. It also adds support for a \m prompt escape to specify where in the prompt the indicator should occur.
Custom prompt mode indicators are now supported in bash 4.4/readline 7.0. However the \m escape functionality was not included in the new version. For a patched version of bash 4.4/readline 7.0 that adds the \m escape functionality see the modestrs-4.4 branch.
$ git clone https://github.com/calid/bash.git -b modestrs --recurse-submodules
$ cd bash
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
You can also just run ./bash after make completes if you want to try the patched version without installing it
Important
This is basically a development branch, and as such I may periodically rebase it onto the latest bash master to keep it up to date. This will cause local branch history to diverge (and cause git pull to open a Merge commit). You can avoid this and reset your local branch to the latest rebased version by doing:
$ git fetch origin
$ git reset --hard origin/modestrs
set show-mode-in-prompt on
set vi-ins-mode-string <some string>
set vi-cmd-mode-string <some other string>
If you don't set custom strings the defaults are (ins) and (cmd).
Set your PS1 as normal, but now you can also include a \m escape to specify where in the prompt you want the mode strings to display. e.g. PS1='\u@\h \m $ '
If you turn show-mode-in-prompt on without specifying \m the default is to display the mode string at the beginning of the last line of the prompt.
You can use color codes in your mode strings. Simply bracket the color escape sequences with \1 and \2. So to produce colored (ins) and (cmd) mode strings like in the demo above you would do:
set vi-ins-mode-string \1\e[34;1m\2(ins)\1\e[0m\2
set vi-cmd-mode-string \1\e[35;1m\2(cmd)\1\e[0m\2
You can also use 256 color escape sequences. Throw in some unicode characters and things can start to get pretty fancy:
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Mode strings currently only work on the last line of multiline prompts. Lame, I know. Unfortunately readline has deeply baked logic to only redraw the last line of multiline prompts, and it will take some work to change this.
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For multiline prompts the vi movement seems to get confused if there's no terminal reset sequence after the last newline. I haven't figured out why this is, but the fix is easy: just make sure you put a reset sequence after the last newline. So not:
PS1='\n\m$ 'but rather:
PS1='\n\[\e[0m\]\m$ '
If you'd like to submit pull requests with fixes or improvements for the mode strings functionality I'm happy to accept them. I'll forward any relevant patches upstream to the bash mailing list (with attribution of course).
If you want a patched version of the standalone readline library: https://github.com/calid/readline.git
The original mailing list post: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2014-08/msg00124.html