Prompt

Mycli provides a configurable prompt. When mycli starts up, it will use the prompt configuration found in its config file. Once mycli is running, you can interactively change the prompt by using the prompt command.

The prompt is generated using the following format sequences:

• \D - full current date, e.g. Sat Feb 14 15:55:48 2026
• \R - current hour in 24-hour time (00–23)
• \r - current hour in 12-hour time (01–12)
• \m - minutes of the current time
• \s - seconds of the current time
• \P - AM/PM
• \d - selected database/schema
• \h - hostname of the server
• \p - connection port
• \j - connection socket basename
• \J - full connection socket path
• \k - connection socket basename OR the port
• \K - full connection socket path OR the port
• \t - database vendor (Percona, MySQL, MariaDB, TiDB)
• \u - username
• \A - DSN alias if any
• \n - a newline
• \_ - a space
• \x1b[...m - an ANSI escape sequence (can style with color)

The default prompt looks something like this: mysql user@localhost:db_name>.

The default format string is \t \u@\h:\d>.

Additional Configuration

Mycli's configuration file has an additional prompt-related option called prompt_continuation. This defaults to ->. This means that when a query spans more than one line, subsequent lines start with ->:

mysql user@localhost:db > SELECT first_name, last_name, date_of_birth
                       -> FROM users
                       -> WHERE

prompt_continuation can also be set to the empty string: ''.