I had multiple prompts. My first was 4 lines! Furthermore, I am using bash (just because I do not always work on my machine and bash is everywhere), so each tab was redisplaying these 4 lines + the completion!

- Empty line
- A whol useless delimiter line ──────
- The time of execution (current time), directory, git branch.
- number of jobs, last error number green or red, actual prompt string: >

A workaround was to use PROMPT_FUNCTION='_prompt', and in the prompt function, there were a call to printf, that has the advantage to:

- Permit to print a right prompt;
- Permit to print some string anywhere in the terminal, like at the top, to display the path, time, etc there instead of bloating the prompt;
- Set the terminal window title;
- Is not redisplayed after each completion;
- Can catch the last exit job.

I removed the ──────. Following <a href="http://github.com/dcat/swm">dcat screen</a> and z3bra advises, I removed even the path, and now, and it is as small as this:

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/whozZpC.png">

A bit like gurhush but still with a newline for clarity, and darthlukan, but with colors to indicate the different states rather than strings. I use the same in my <code><a href="http://blog.z3bra.org/2013/11/plain-old-mails.html">.mailrc</a></code>.

To get colors in the bash completion, you can ad this readline option in you .inputrc:

<pre>set colored-stats on</pre>