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