On 11/21/08, Duncan Coutts
On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 11:59 +0100, Philip K.F. Hölzenspies wrote:
On Friday 21 November 2008 10:49:47 Jules Bean wrote:
Something must be very very broken : surely it is not expected behaviour for editline to need configuration in this way?
One can call it broken, another will say users should settle for the default behaviour. Neither readline, nor editline *need* configuration this way, because they do come with sensible defaults.
But that's just it. It seems that readline does come with sensible defaults and editline does not. For example xterm is not a rare kind of terminal (basically every terminal in use claims to be xterm) and yet delete does not work with it out-of-the-box with editline. That is broken.
[To add insult to injury, even when I look up the escape sequence for delete using the cat/telnet trick, I still cannot configure editline to recognise it.]
After further investigation, I think this technically isn't a terminal compatibility issue, but rather a missing feature; i.e., editline just doesn't intentionally support using the delete key. The command ed-delete-next-char which we found in the editrc manpage is really meant to represent pressing 'x' in the vi bindings, which is why it hasn't been working as expected. AFAICT, editline has no command equivalent to pressing 'delete'. Of course, regardless of the cause, the net result (delete key not working) is the same. I just wanted to point out that editline does use the same terminal capability libraries (termcap/terminfo) as readline, so there's no fundamental reason this couldn't be implemented portably other than (I'm guessing) the lack of motivation or time from its authors/contributors. -Judah