OK, let's manually decode this:
%{ begin literal escape sequence
\033[32m change color to number 2 (too lazy to look up the exact color)
%} end literal escape sequence
%B start boldface ***A
[ a literal opening square bracket
%n the user name
@ a literal at sign
%{ begin literal escape sequence
\033[33m change color to number 3
%} end literal escape sequence
%m the host name (short version)
%{ begin literal escape sequence
\033[33m change color to number 3 again ***B
%} end literal escape sequence
] a literal closing square bracket
%b end bold face ***C
%{ begin literal escape sequence
\033\0m change color and bold back to normal
%} end literal escape sequence
%/ the current working directory
a space
# a literal pound sign ***D
a space
Here are my comments on this (they are marked with *** above):
A: You are changing to bold face here, but you already changed the color earlier. In reality, what "start bold face" really does is nothing but send an ANSI escape sequence to the terminal (it is "\033[1m"). So if you think at the series of escape sequences that is sent to the terminal, it gets confusing: \033[32m\033[1m\033[33m ... and so on. You can do that more efficiently yourself by taking control of the boldface in your own escape sequences, and send this sequence: "\033[1;32m", which means "begin bold face and color number 2".
B: You change to color number 3 twice in a row. The second one is redundant.
C: Ah, here lie dragons! You are now asking to end bold face. That is usually implemented by sending the sequence "\033[0m", which turns *ALL* special rendition off, and changes the color back to normal. Fortunately, you also manually do the same thing a moment later. This is either wrong or redundant: it would be wrong if you had anything after ***C and before turning the color off, but you don't; so it is only redundant.
All three of these comments can be taken care of if you simply take over the boldface yourself. Do a wikipedia search for "ANSI escape code", and read the page, it explains very clearly how this all works (I think I helped edit it a few years ago).
D: You are using a pound sign for both normal users and root. Here is a trick I like to use: Instead of "#", use "%#: That gives you a pound sign for root, but ">" for normal users. Like this you immediately know whether you're logged in as root.
Today that part of the prompt has vanished entirely..
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View attachment 4621
What's going on, I wonder? Multiple glitches in the Matrix?
You said you had been messing with network settings. You probably changed the host name of the machine. You can look that up with the "hostname" command. It is even possible for a machine to temporarily have no hostname.
