Wider feedback requested on two changes to our base/core defaults

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Ondrej Vasik <ovasik at redhat.com> said:
> I agree that opening square bracket is useless, but I want to have the
> directory and $/# character separated. This prompt is well established,
> however I agree that we can probably get one character less with
> something like 
> foo at localhost lib>$

I freely admit this is just an opinion thing, but: why do you need two
separator characters between the directory and the command?  Also, I
would avoid ">" as that's the old csh prompt character.

My personal prompt for a long time has been '\h:\!:\w\$ ', which gives
prompts like (I like having the full path, which is another reason I'm
sensitive to longer hostnames as well):

linode:20:~$ 
linode:21:/var/log$ 

Having the history number is useful if you like to use '!<number>'
commands to re-run a previous command (although I don't usually do that
anymore, and have left ':\!' in the prompt just because it looks weird
to me without a number now :) ).

Obviously, I change the prompt on my personal systems, but not usually
on work/shared systems, so I would still affected by changing the
default.  I just think that any change should have some good
justification behind it at this point, not just opinion or "it is
obviously better" (with no reasoning).

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>