autojump not working because PROMPT_COMMAND is __vte_prompt_command

[David D Lowe]

autojump is not working for me. It was not adding directories to autojump -s, even though I was sourcing /usr/share/autojump/autojump.sh in .bashrc (in Ubuntu 21.10, according to the instructions in /usr/share/doc/autojump/README.Debian .

Under known issues, the documentation says that PROMPT_COMMAND should not be overwritten. So I decided run this command to troubleshoot:

$ echo "$PROMPT_COMMAND"
__vte_prompt_command

Clearly, something is wrong here, as autojump's code is not in PROMPT_COMMAND.

[David D Lowe]

After doing some digging, I found this code in /etc/profile.d/vte-2.91.sh :

case "$TERM" in
  xterm*|vte*)
    [ -n "${BASH_VERSION:-}" ] && PROMPT_COMMAND=__vte_prompt_command
    [ -n "${ZSH_VERSION:-}"  ] && precmd_functions+=(__vte_osc7)
    ;;
esac

I changed one line so that it now looks like:

case "$TERM" in
  xterm*|vte*)
    [ -n "${BASH_VERSION:-}" ] && PROMPT_COMMAND="${PROMPT_COMMAND:+$PROMPT_COMMAND ;} __vte_prompt_command"
    [ -n "${ZSH_VERSION:-}"  ] && precmd_functions+=(__vte_osc7)
    ;;
esac

And now autojump works as expected.

Note that newer versions of Bash accept an array PROMPT_COMMAND variable (as an alternative to a normal string variable). It would be good if all this code was updated to treat PROMPT_COMMAND as a Bash array some day.