Prompt contains garbage characters

[greencardamom]

Prompt contains garbage characters

[faho]

echo $TERM is vt100

That's not normal. "vt100" describes a 1970s physical terminal. That's not what you are running.

You want the default, which for Gnome Terminal typically is xterm-256color. If you changed the setting, change it back. If you didn't, figure out what broke it.

That's why fish acts in a way that's incompatible with your actual terminal.

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Some more detail: See infocmp vt100 xterm-256color. This compares the vt100 and xterm-256color terminfo entries, and tells you which sequences look different in both.

For intance, sgr0 (the "turn off all attributes" sequence that fish would send for set_color normal, one of the most important escape sequences in xterm-256color is \E(B\E[m, while in vt100 it is \E[m\017$<2>.

That's your culprit - fish does the right thing and looks at your terminal's definitions to figure out how to talk to it, but what it is told your terminal is isn't it, and your terminal doesn't understand that, frankly, ancient dialect.

This is why you keep $TERM as the default and don't change it (except for sometimes "xterm" to "xterm-256color" or similar, but those are very closely related dialects).

[greencardamom]

Worked!

acre:[/home/greenc] echo $TERM
xterm-256color
acre:[/home/greenc] fish
Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell
Type help for instructions on how to use fish
acre:[/home/greenc] echo $TERM
xterm-256color
acre:[/home/greenc]

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I'm using a tcsh .login file that was probably created in the 1980s or maybe earlier (I got it from a co worker in the 80s) and then I copied it from computer to computer over the years, first time this became a problem. Thank you very much.