Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Ah, why would anyone expect that changing the tty line edit characters
> would have any effect on a character-oriented editor that's built into
> some application (such as /bin/sh, ftp, gdb, or whatever)?  Would you
> really expect "stty werase :" to change vi's interpretation of ':'?  I
> sure wouldn't.  Neither do I assume that "stty erase ^?" will change my
> settings of delete-backward-char in emacs or jove.

Ah!  I take it you haven't tried this?  Try setting `stty werase :`, fire
up vi, enter insert mode, then type a few words.  Type a ':', see the last
word get deleted.  What did you expect to happen?  If your strange editor
doesn't do this, then perhaps you should change it ;-)

Anyway, even if sh/libedit ignores werase, shouldn't ^W still delete the word
before the cursor?  This seems to be the standard setting for readline.

> Yes there is some trickery with /bin/sh since it is fundamentally
> perceived to be tied to the very idea of command-line input.  However
> there's a big difference between "cat -u | sh" and "sh -E"!

On my 1.4 system (don't have anything newer to test at hand), it means that
`sh -E` always uses ^W for delete last word, but `sh` follows the `stty
werase` setting.  Neither uses ^W for kill.  I've obviously missed your
point ...

Ignoring all this, I take it that it's not something strange that I'm doing
and other people also see ^W act like kill and not werase?

Thanks,

J

-- 
                    My other computer also runs NetBSD
                          http://www.netbsd.org/