Make OS X Terminal commands I type BOLD

Question

I'd like to make commands I've typed (input) into terminal stand out from all the output.

For example:

imac:~ buster$ chmod -R g-w myfolder
imac:~ buster$ cd myfolder
imac:myfolder buster$ ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 9 root admin 306 Apr 20 2010 bin
drwxr-xr-x 7 root admin 238 Apr 20 2010 include
drwxr-xr-x 73 root admin 2482 May 18 17:16 lib
drwxr-xr-x 6 root admin 204 Apr 20 2010 man
imac:myfolder buster$ echo Go Giants!
Go Giants!

bold jumps to mind but I'd accept a color or even highlighting the whole line...

I'm sure there's a way to do this but it's not obvious to me...

thanks!

Daniel Beck · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-27T20:22:37.590

9

Edit your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc (see Gilles' comment below) and add the following lines:

BOLD="\[\033[1m\]"
OFF="\[\033[m\]"
PS1="${OFF}\u@\h:\w \$${BOLD}"
PS2="> ${BOLD}"
trap 'echo -ne "${OFF}" > $(tty)' DEBUG

Move the ${BOLD} around to make part of the prompt also bold. If the prompt itself should not be colored, you need the ${OFF} prefix in PS1, otherwise empty lines (pressing enter without having something written) will make the following prompt bold (credits to @Jay, thanks again!)

This adds a debug trap to turn bold format off, so it's quite a hack. Credits (works without group tty on OS X though).

This is a bit of a hack, so use it at your own risk.

Only setting your PS1/PS2 prompts to bold would be easier and just as visible:

BOLD="\[\033[1m\]"
OFF="\[\033[m\]"
PS1="${BOLD}\u@\h:\w \$${OFF}"
PS2="${BOLD}>${OFF} "

edited Oct 27 '10 at 20:22

answered Oct 27 '10 at 17:58

Daniel Beck

110,419

1

Not ~/.bash_profile, but ~/.bashrc (or both, if you don't source .bashrc from .bash_profile). These settings need to be set for each interactive instance of bash, and .bash_profile is read only by login shells. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Oct 27 '10 at 18:16
Thanks, will edit my answer. I have no bashrc, so I used what was there. – Daniel Beck Oct 27 '10 at 18:20
@Gilles: An exception to the terminal window guidelines is Mac OS X’s Terminal.app, which runs a login shell by default for each new terminal window, calling .bash_profile instead of .bashrc. Other GUI terminal emulators may do the same, but most tend not to. – Daniel Beck Oct 27 '10 at 18:22
When i press at an empty prompt, the new prompt is bold. Is there a fix for this? – Jay Oct 27 '10 at 18:31
@Jay: I'd have to research it. Is there a reason you're doing this, or just because it's possible? – Daniel Beck Oct 27 '10 at 18:41
2

I figured it out, put an ${OFF} at the front: PS1="${OFF}\u@\h:\w $${BOLD}" – Jay Oct 27 '10 at 18:41
@Jay Aaah, of course. I'll edit my answer. Thanks! – Daniel Beck Oct 27 '10 at 18:44
@Daniel: Regarding .bashrc vs .bash_profile, the document you cite is mostly correct. (The one mistake I spotted was that it gives an example with PATH being set in .bashrc, but that should be .bash_profile.) Basically the only sane configuration is for .bash_profile to source .bashrc, as in the example given. See also Difference between .bashrc and .bash_profile. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Oct 27 '10 at 19:05
To answer your previous question, I do press at an empty prompt ever now and then. Sometimes gunk characters end-up in there somehow. Sometimes the prompt gets displayed at the end of the previous line instead of on its own line. I press enter to fix it. – Jay Oct 27 '10 at 19:09
1

@Daniel: There shouldn't be an underscore in ~/.bashrc. – Dennis Williamson Oct 27 '10 at 19:27
There are still a few problems with this. Pressing the up arrow a few times causes the terminal to think the first 3 characters of the command are part of the prompt, and it won't let you remove them. Also, the list of matches you get when typing part of a file name then , gets printed in bold. – Jay Oct 27 '10 at 20:02
@Jay Resizing the window also colors the prompt like the command. It's quite easy to break this, actually -- mine and your second issue are when the shell (re)writes something without hitting PS1 or Enter. This is probably why this is a hacky approach as written in the answer, with a non-hacky alternative provided. But it's the best I could come up with, and I'm not seeing that many better answers (yet). Let's hope someone smarter than me can figure this out. – Daniel Beck Oct 27 '10 at 20:08
@Jay Could you try to reproduce the "first three characters" issue again? I think I fixed it, but my up-arrow is a different command anyway and I can't find where I changed it right now. – Daniel Beck Oct 27 '10 at 20:23
1

If I use the up arrow four times in a row, to go through the command history, then the first 3 characters of the old command becomes part of the prompt, and there is no way to remove them. I can't delete them with the backspace key. – Jay Oct 27 '10 at 20:40
@Jay not for me, must be something else. I even reset my inputrc so I get the default up-arrow behavior. Sorry. – Daniel Beck Oct 27 '10 at 20:44
what does the trap "hack" in the first example do exactly? I'm not much of a BASH expert (obviously). I can sorta surmise the turning on and off of BOLD codes w/in the 2 main prompts...but not sure what trap/debug mean here. – Meltemi Oct 28 '10 at 15:56
@Meltemi: "hack" means I'm using a debugging facility in a way it probably shouldn't be used. trap is a bash buildin, so I'll refer you to the bash man page, just search for trap [-lp] [arg] [sigspec ...] in there and you see what it does. Short version is: "If a sigspec is DEBUG, the command arg is executed after every simple command (see SHELL GRAMMAR above).". Means whenever a command was entered, we send the OFF format string to the filename of the current TTY. – Daniel Beck Oct 28 '10 at 17:42

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 12 '16 at 10:44

I had a little trouble with the solutions here while using El Capitan (esp. in iTerm2 but in plain old Terminal as well). I got two sorts of errors:

The ability to delete my bash prompt entirely by just pressing space then backspace
Unwanted characters finding their way into my bash output, e.g. the input pwd would result in
```
\[\]/Users/home/Directory
```
or in
```
\e[0m/Users/home/Directory
```

I propose the following solution, which is really just more of the same.

    BOLD="\033[1m"
    OFF="\033[m"
    PS1="${OFF}\u@\h :${BOLD}"
    PS2="> ${BOLD}"
    trap 'echo -ne "${OFF}" > $(tty)' DEBUG

Nice job! Just a few minor differences, but I'm glad you discovered a way for this to work with El Captain. — DrZoo, Apr 12 '16 at 17:50

Make OS X Terminal commands I type BOLD

2 Answers2

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