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Is it possible to use colors in the Emacs shell prompt (the prompt itself, not the rest of the shell screen) with the bash PS1 variable? I believe I have the syntax correct (e.g., PS1='[\u@\h \[\e[0;31m\]\W\[\e[m\]]\$ ' - it works in term or ansi-term), but it seems like Emacs is applying the comint-highlight-prompt face. I can set that to some color, and it works, but I want to be able to set individual parts of the prompt to different colors. I prefer using shell over term or ansi-term, so I'd rather not switch.

Thanks.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Figured it out: The comint-highlight-prompt face was set to inherit from minibuffer-prompt, which was setting the :weight, :foreground and :background. Removing the inheritance prevented the colors set in PS1 from being overridden by the comint-highlight-prompt face. Added this to my .emacs file.

(set-face-attribute 'comint-highlight-prompt nil :inherit nil)

Also, M-x customize-group <ret> font-lock-faces was helpful in figuring this out.

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That will not work in Ubuntu 16.04 that uses Emacs 24.5 due to Emacs bug debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20084 that has already been fixed on git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git at commit 792d44b3c31d2a682607ab8b79ae7d26b7402f41. To make your solution work, use gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/… with "comint" to fix "comint-snapshot-last-prompt" and "comint-output-filter" and with "font-lock" to add "font-lock--remove-face-from-text-property".
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I would recommend not to change the face globally (since there are many comint users besides shell mode) but in a buffer specific manner by setting a mode hook:

(add-hook 'shell-mode-hook (lambda () (face-remap-set-base 'comint-highlight-prompt :inherit nil)))
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I use that to change the terminal color and the information in mac, maybe can help:

Cyan="$(tput setaf 6)" NC="$(tput sgr0)" # No Color export PS1="$Cyan.Where-> \w\n\\$\[$NC\]"
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Thanks, but it still gets set to the comint-highlight-prompt face. I have tried doing (set-face-foreground 'comint-highlight-prompt nil) in my .emacs file, but the prompt still gets set to all cyan.

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