Zsh: change color of vared -p command

Question

I tried:

vared -p '"$(print \"\e[1;31test\")" something' -c tmp

Output echo "$(print \"\e[1;31test\")" something

But I want to change color of test word here. Howto achieve?

Answer 1

The argument to -p understands prompt expansion, so it's just:

var=; vared -p '%B%F{red}something%f: ' var

• %B: bold (%b to stop bold)
• %F{red}: red foreground (%K for bacKground).
• %f: restore default foreground color.

Doing:

vared -p $'\e[1;31msomething: ' var

which would be equivalent to vared -p "$(printf '\e[1;31msomething: ')" (corrected from the version in your question) would be a bad idea as it would fool zle's cursor positioning by letting it think that the prompt is 18 columns wide while in fact it's only 11 columns wide as \e[1;31m is not visible.

Answer 2

Can achieve this by using double quotes after -p and load colors module of zsh.