From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Mon Nov 23 10:05:50 1998
Subject: Readline (was ... replay history)
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: wskdpl at pukrs12 dot puk dot ac dot za
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu (Octave Help List)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 10:04:48 -0600 (CST)

On 23-Nov-1998, Dirk Laurie <dirk at calvyn dot puk dot ac dot za> wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| > 
| > For now though, do the history and run_history commands, or the
| > reverse searching feature in readline (C-r) help?
| > 
| C-r is useful: I hadn't thought of it.  Thanks.
| 
| While we are on the topic of readline: those of us who come to
| Linux via MSDOS rather than Sun or DEC Unix'es set up our xterm's
| so Delete erases the character under the cursor instead of the one
| to the left of it, which Backspace also deletes.
| 
| The way I do it is by putting an entry
|   DEL: delete-char
| in my ~/.inputrc file in the part dealing with an xterm.
| According to the readline manpage, readline is initialized
| from that file.
| 
| Unfortunately Octave seems to override the xterm settings.
| Is there any way to get Octave to make the Delete key do
| delete-char in Octave?

Does

  DEL: delete-char

actually work for xterms running bash?  I couldn't make that work, but

  "\C-?": delete-char

did seem to work correctly for me.

Octave does read the ~/.inputrc file, but it doesn't pay attention to
anything inside term= or program name conditionals because of a small
programming error that the following patch should fix.

Thanks,

jwe


Mon Nov 23 09:40:26 1998  John W. Eaton  <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>

	* input.cc (initialize_readline): Set rl_readline_name and
	rl_terminal_name before calling rl_initialize.


*** src/input.cc~	Fri May 15 21:48:07 1998
--- src/input.cc	Mon Nov 23 09:53:56 1998
***************
*** 995,1009 ****
  void
  initialize_readline (void)
  {
    // Set things up internally in case some function that uses readline
    // (currently Fclc(), maybe others) is called before readline().
  
    rl_initialize ();
  
-   // Allow conditional parsing of the ~/.inputrc file
- 
-   rl_readline_name = "Octave";
- 
    // Tell the completer that we want to try first.
  
    rl_attempted_completion_function = (CPPFunction *) command_completer;
--- 995,1011 ----
  void
  initialize_readline (void)
  {
+   // Allow conditional parsing of the ~/.inputrc file based on the
+   // program name and terminal type.
+ 
+   rl_readline_name = "Octave";
+   rl_terminal_name = getenv ("TERM");
+ 
    // Set things up internally in case some function that uses readline
    // (currently Fclc(), maybe others) is called before readline().
  
    rl_initialize ();
  
    // Tell the completer that we want to try first.
  
    rl_attempted_completion_function = (CPPFunction *) command_completer;