 in Your System Prompt | Hacker News Reader

 in Your System Prompt

bbs-software.com

9 pointsricny04617 comments

U+F8FF is the last code-point of the private use zone. Appearance of the character is entirely random and depends on the font in use. Don't use it for anything outside of an environment you can control. For me it's displayed as a rectangle with F8FF in it, because I'm using Linux, which surprisingly does not ship fonts with the Apple logo in it ;)

Ubuntu Mono font has an Apple logo in it.

Yes, and you can have “💩” in your prompt. Wait, you won't believe it, but you can even have “$” in your prompt! It is worth a blog post (in first page of HN)?

Apple's fucking emoticons. I had to jailbreak and install a whitelist specifically because of the emoticon SMS spam.

They've been in Unicode since 6.0. And they are not much Apple's in the first place.

Yes. Apple renders them as little colorful pictures.

At least provide a screenshot. You even linked to a page saying that you should never use that character on a website.

It's a rectangle for me as well.

Several years ago, while being logged into and working on several remote Linux servers simultaneously, I rebooted the wrong one.

I realized it approximately .002 milliseconds after pressing <Enter> (after "shutdown -r now") but it was too late.

Since then, I use one style of prompt on my personal machines and other non-critical hosts. On production/critical machines, I use a different style of prompt that stands out quite a bit and includes the hostname in all caps.

It seems simple (and it is) but it has done the job of keeping me from rebooting a critical production machine during the middle of the day.

You are gonna loooove molly-guard then.

Although the different prompt style for remote systems is still handy, cause there's tons of other stuff you can do accidentaly that could cause damage.

This has happened far too many times for me too. A colored/distinct prompt is a must.

Seems to be down. Google cache version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1256&bih=91...

Edit: alive again

Under OSX I use the Emoji characters to indicate what server I'm on, and I use the red police light character if it's a production machine.

You can also tell iTerm to report its terminal type as something specific, then do something like this in your bashrc to setup a different prompt if you're not on OSX:

if [ $TERM = "xterm-256color" ]; then

Private use Unicode block.. for me it shows a box only, though it would be cool to have the Klingon symbol:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/f8ff/index.htm

Why would I want a square in my prompt?

To tell you that there is encoding (or font) problems in your setup before it turns into a real issue. (?)

TIL I have an encoding or font problem by not using Mac OS X..

Reminds me of "put a burger in your shell".

http://notes.torrez.org/2013/04/put-a-burger-in-your-shell.h...

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