It’s always the little things in life. One of the things that has been a very “little thing” that causes a lot of frustration while writing The MySQL Administrator’s Bible is the prompt. Specifically, the fact that you can only change the first line of the prompt, but not the subsequent lines.

The default prompt that appears on the first line of the prompt is:
mysql>
The default (and unchangeable) second line of the prompt is four spaces followed by an ASCII arrow:

    ->

The second line of the prompt is hard-coded to match up very nicely with the first line in a fixed-width font:

mysql> SELECT
    -> 1+2;

However, you can change the prompt, which is pretty handy:

mysql> prompt \d: