The very last character looks ugly

[szwed]

OS: 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu
Terminal: Putty/SuperPutty

[twolfson]

Your font might not support all of the characters. What font are you using?

I am using Anonymous Pro. Do you see that error if you try it out?

http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

[szwed]

Actually, I was thinking about introducing the prompt on 40-50 Ubuntu servers used by developers as build machines. I assumed that the sexy-bash-prompt will work there out of the box, there is nothing mentioned in the documentation about the need of additional fonts installation... and I can't do that as the new font might break something else (for instance: user specific prompts)

As far as I know, Ubuntu uses: http://font.ubuntu.com/

Is there a chance that the deafult Ubuntu font will be supported? :)

[twolfson]

SSH sessions do not load fonts from remote machines. They send character codes back and forth between the local terminal and remote machine. The codes sent back are displayed in a terminal emulator, in your case PuTTY.

Also, please verify PuTTY is using the Ubuntu font (your screenshot does not seem to be at a glance; there are serifs on a and x which don't appear in any Ubuntu flavors). I will look into using PuTTY + Ubuntu font some time by next Friday.

[twolfson]

Alright, I have looked into this. The problem is PuTTY, Windows, and the character choices I have made.

I have verified this by:

1. Using ievms to get a Windows 7 VM up and running
2. Download PuTTY and SSH to the VM's parent machine
3. Tried out all fonts including Ubuntu Mono which I downloaded. None of them worked.
4. SSH'd on normal machine and tried out Ubuntu Mono. It worked.

I tried both PuTTY and superputty but both use PuTTY for the SSH session; superputty is a wrapper for the GUI related features

Windows screenshots:

Linux screenshots:

[twolfson]

It seems that Windows loses the unfilled triangles but could potentially support all characters. The empty hexagons are not visible in the raw GitHub view of the prompt:

[twolfson]

Unfortunately, there is no way to detect if an SSH session will/will not support a character. The session only knows about the local device and nothing about the remote device that is performing the SSH.

Some options for you:

• Fork the prompt and define your own character set

  • sexy-bash-prompt/.bash_prompt

    Lines 139 to 154 in 689cc5e

    	# Iterate through all the cases and if it matches, then echo
    	if [[ $DIRTY_BRANCH == 1 && $BRANCH_AHEAD == 1 && $BRANCH_BEHIND == 1 ]]; then
    	echo "⬢"
    	elif [[ $DIRTY_BRANCH == 1 && $BRANCH_AHEAD == 1 ]]; then
    	echo "▲"
    	elif [[ $DIRTY_BRANCH == 1 && $BRANCH_BEHIND == 1 ]]; then
    	echo "▼"
    	elif [[ $BRANCH_AHEAD == 1 && $BRANCH_BEHIND == 1 ]]; then
    	echo "⬡"
    	elif [[ $BRANCH_AHEAD == 1 ]]; then
    	echo "△"
    	elif [[ $BRANCH_BEHIND == 1 ]]; then
    	echo "▽"
    	elif [[ $DIRTY_BRANCH == 1 ]]; then
    	echo "*"
    	fi

• Use a less robust sexy-bash-prompt, e.g. the gist this was initially forked from
  • https://gist.github.com/gf3/306785/a35d28b6bdd0f7c54318cce510738438f04dabaa
• Use a git completion prompt based
  • http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/1j8fft/know_your_git_status_from_your_bash_prompt/cbchrrw

I will add a note to the README about lack of Windows SSH support.

[szwed]

Thanks for the very detailed clarification!