virtualenv supports six shells: bash, csh, fish, xonsh, cmd, posh. Each handles prompts slightly differently. Although the virtualenv custom prompt behavior should be the same across shells, Brian Skinn noticed inconsistencies. He set out to fix those inconsistencies. That was the start of an adventure in open source collaboration, shell prompt internals, difficult test problems, and continuous integration quirks.

Brian Skinn initially noticed that on Windows cmd, a space was added between a prefix defined by --prompt and the rest of the prompt, whereas on bash no space was added.

For reference, there were/are three nominal virtualenv prompt modification behaviors, all of which apply to the prompt changes that are made at the time of virtualenv activation:

Special Guest: Brian Skinn.

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Links:

• virtualenv
• Initial issue that started the adventure
• final PR
• pent: pent Extracts Numerical Text -- Mini-language driven parser for structured numerical data
• Lightening talk on pent