How to make the terminal’s command prompt shorter to increase line realestate

bash uses \[ \] to determine the "displayed length": text between those two escapes is considered unprintable and not counted in the total length; everything else is.

There seems to be a problem with your variables: bright='\[[01m\]' doesn't actually include an ESC character, so [01m gets printed as normal text but is not counted in the length. It should be '\[\e[01m\]'. Same for all other variables.

Related:

• in Bash, you can put \$(hg_status) to $PS1 directly, without the need for a separate PROMPT_COMMAND.

But, after all, why should virtualenv be active in global gnome-shell context ?

This would surely break all system-level python application installed.

So the only safe way to start a virtualenv application is to start from a terminal shell

Probably it is safer to activate environment in the ~/.bash_profile ~/.zprofile, enabling login-shell option in terminal.

The alternative setting, using ~/.bashrc, should be avoided because it can cause problems in subshells.

So,

• enable the login-option
• start the terminal (or bash/zsh --login in xterm ...)
• "workon"
• then start emacs (server) from the terminal shell.

To run a virtualenv application from gnome-shell, the desktop file must exec a dedicated wrapper script that source env activate before execution.

For a generic wrapper (similar to ruby 'bundle exec' and rvm stuff), see:

• https://gist.github.com/datagrok/2199506

Maybe a 're-hash' is required ...

• https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/blob/develop/virtualenv_embedded/activate.sh#L76