Re: Bug report

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 14,  7:44pm, Patrick Oscity wrote:
}
} 	* the right prompt is not right aligned, it is in fact shifted to the
} 	  left by one character

This is intentional, because a particular kind of terminal device that
was very widespread a few years ago had a misfeature wherein printing to
the lower right corner character position scrolls the screen up a line.

Terminal types that have this behavior are not readily identifiable from
terminfo descriptions, and the extra space along the right side was
deemed less annoying than an entire extra line across the bottom (and
corresponding loss of whatever was in the line that scrolled off the
top).

Worse, there was another common terminal where filling the bottom line
of the screen and then writing a trailing newline would NOT scroll the
display, resulting in e.g. blank lines disappearing from output.

Much easier than attempting to detect different combinations of this was
to always be sure that the only thing ever written in the lower right
corner *is* a newline, and only when scrolling is wanted.

Given the number of other prompt-specific setopts we have at this point,
we could potentially add another one to control this, but I think the
default behavior should remain as it is.