Live from Austin!

One feature the Unix shell offers is customizing prompts. Most ‘power users’ make use of the feature, and it is indeed very handy. However, it’s easy to go completely overboard and end up with a prompt like this:

[21:52:15] [fred@webhost:/var/log/apache] $

The problem with a long prompt is that you quickly hit the right hand edge of the screen and your command starts wrapping. If you use KDE, however, there’s a better way.

Konsole

The xterm program introduced an escape sequence to set the window title. That can help a bit, because now you can put some of the boring info up in the window title, and reserve the prompt for path information.

I use KDE, and the Konsole terminal program in KDE goes further than xterm. As well as letting you change the window title, you can also have multiple terminal sessions in tabs (like Firefox web page tabs), and chance their titles too. The purpose of this posting is to explain the extra functionality in Konsole, and how to make use of it with the bash shell (default in Linux).

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Wasted a few hours yesterday trying to install Zope and CMF, as lots of people have raved about CMF as a content management system for web site construction. Unfortunately, Zope relies on Python… and it seems that the current version of Python is incompatible with Zope, and the previous version doesn’t build on Mac OS X. (Or rather, it eventually built after some hacking, but bad things happened when it tried to find any of its standard libraries.) Oh well, it was worth a try, and I didn’t especially want to learn Python anyway.

Today I tried Jakarta Tomcat. Since OS X already has Apache and Java fully installed, this took about five minutes; Apple even have some step-by-step instructions. So it looks like any dynamic web site construction I do with open source tools is going to be in Java. Suits me fine.