How can I properly use an American flag emoji in my bash prompt?

Question

I want to use an American flag emoji in my bash prompt (i.e. PS1 environment variable). However, the American flag emoji causes the terminal cursor to offset an extra character to the right.

is comprised of two unicode characters, and . I believe terminal is converting this to a mono-spaced emoji character (the flag), yet still allocating space for two characters. How can I achieve my expected cursor position?

I want:
Desktop user ls|

I get:
Desktop user ls | <-weird space offset of cursor

My ~/.bash_profile is:
export PS1=' \W \u '

If you don't type a space after typing "ls", how do you get that space? And how is the space related to PS1 variable? Shouldn't that be a result of auto completion? — 炸鱼薯条德里克, Jan 31 '19 at 02:42
I’m not typing a space after `ls`. bash starts with a space between my input and the cursor. — Andrew Kirna, Jan 31 '19 at 03:48
@ 炸鱼薯条德里克, that's because I want my commands spaced away from the Statue of Liberty. — Andrew Kirna, Jan 31 '19 at 15:07
another related question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54983257/; bash uses `wcswidth()` function from system library to determine displayed size of a string, and apparently, it's not smart enough to combine those characters. — sendmoreinfo, Jul 25 '19 at 20:06

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 03 '22 at 22:09

I know you said you use bashrc, but when I was customizing my zshrc config, I found out different terminals have different spacing between characters. I recommend trying out Terminator, kitty terminal and rxvt-unicode to see if one of them gives the result you want.

One important note is that if you use one of the nerdfonts at https://www.nerdfonts.com/ you might be able to achieve the terminal look you want. Fonts also play a part.

How can I properly use an American flag emoji in my bash prompt?

1 Answers1