Help on controlling BASH command line

[pking123-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org]

Hello

I have noticed over the past 10 years a "feature" about BASH (or 
probably xterm) that has me mildly annoyed. It is only now that I 
wish to discuss it since no one I know of has complained about it.

I like coloured command prompts. My current one is:
             PS1='\e[1;31m\h\e[m::\e[1;33m\w\e[m \e[1;32m>\e[m'
Now if I type in a command, say of more than 20 characters, the 
display goes nuts. That is, the cursor jumps to the previous line on 
some nonrandom column and continues for another 5 or 6 characters, 
then jumps to the previous line to that.

This could be a problem with xterm, although trying it now on a 
console, there is an earliy linebreak to the line below, so the 
program running the command line just deals with the bug differently.

Now, if I type a line, I would like it to be *me* that inserts the 
carriage returns; not the program. Is there a way to do this?

Paul King

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