[This tip is also great if you use a mouse to copy and paste command lines in your window.]
Some terminals I've used (like old Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix terminals) had local editing. You could move your cursor up the screen to a previous command line, maybe make some edits to it, then press a SEND LINE key to resend that line to the host. This didn't have anything to do with sophisticated command-line editing ( 11.13 ) like some UNIX shells have now. Maybe your terminal can do that, too.
The problem was that unless I erased the shell prompt (
%
) on my screen, it would be sent back to the shell and give the error "
%
: Command not found." So I set my shell prompt to this:
set prompt=' '
That's right: four spaces. Most UNIX commands start their output at column 1, so my command lines were easy to find because they were indented. And the shell didn't care if I sent four spaces before the command line. So everything was fine until I got my new terminal without a SEND LINE key...
(If you want some information in your prompt, too, make a multiline prompt ( 7.5 ) with four spaces in the last line.)
-