From help-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Tue Aug 30 15:28:07 1994
Subject: Re: Some basic questions 
From: John Eaton <jwe at che dot utexas dot edu>
To: wtc at courage dot arlut dot utexas dot edu (Wichaya Changwatchai)
cc: help-octave at che dot utexas dot edu (Octave help mailing list)
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 15:27:26 EDT

wtc at courage dot arlut dot utexas dot edu (Wichaya Changwatchai) wrote:

: Some more basic questions:
: 
: 1) Is there an up-to-date man page for octave?  There doesn't seem to be one
: included in the octave-1.0 distribution I downloaded from ftp.che.utexas.edu.

No.  The next release will probably include a simple man page that
points to the Texinfo documentation.

: 2) Is there an initialization script that can automatically be called every
: time octave is invoked?  I'd like to initialize PS1 and some other user prefs
: each time I start up octave.  I've tried doing:
: 
: 	octave initfile
: 
: but that just seems to run whatever's in the initfile and then quit.

Octave will look for the files ~/.octaverc and ./.octaverc at startup
time.  This will be documented for the next release.

: 3) When I try to use forward-search-history (C-s), apparently Octave
: doesn't intercept the keystroke and it performs a pause (and I have
: to unpause with C-q).  Is there a way I can enable this?

This works for me after resetting the tty mode with stty.  For
example, after

  $ stty stop ^u

C-s does incremental search, but C-u doesn't work.  There is a similar
problem with C-o (operate-and-get-next).  Perhaps readline should set
more of the tty options.

: 4) Even though reverse-search-history (C-r) is an incremental
: search, I can't seem to get it to revise the search, i.e., if I try
: to backspace during the search to edit my search word, it drops out
: of search mode (unlike in GNU emacs).  Is there a way of revising an
: incremental search in the middle of that search?

I believe that incremental searching in Emacs used to work like
incremental searching in readline does now.  I don't know if this has
been fixed in a newer version of readline.

: 5) I tried M-C-j to toggle to vi editing mode, but I couldn't toggle
: back to emacs mode, either inside insertion mode or outside.  (I had
: to exit Octave to re-enable emacs mode) Why is this?

M-C-e seems to work for me, though it doesn't appear to be documented.

I will probably update the version of readline for the next release to
either readline 2.0 or the copy distributed with the latest version of
bash.

If these problems are not fixed in those packages, it might be worth
reporting the bugs to bug-bash at prep dot ai dot mit dot edu dot 

Thanks,

jwe