How can I have the return string of a program appear in my tcsh prompt?

Question

I am using vcprompt to provide me with the git branch and dirtiness status. It returns it as a string.

How can I catch this string in my tcsh prompt setting? I guess I need to put the call to vcprompt somehow in the prompt definition, but I can't find the syntax for that.

Edit: Solution is:

alias precmd "echo -n `vcprompt`"

Answer 1

In the original C shell, you could simply embed command substitution directly into the prompt variable, which I always thought made more sense. Under tcsh, you have to set up the precmd alias to do it. I'm not familiar with vcprompt but I assume it generates a newline at the end, so you'll probably want to use echo -n to throw away that newline, putting the prompt on the same line as the command, not the line before. Set prompt to whatever you want following; here I'm assuming you'll want a space.

alias precmd echo -n `vcprompt`
set prompt = ' '