[ On Tuesday, February 29, 2000 at 13:37:04 (+0000), Julian Coleman wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: ^W killed my line
>
> 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.

Eghads!  That's weird!  Oddly enough <CTRL-W> still does a word-erase in
vi too but suddenly there's no way to get to the extended command
prompt.

>  What did you expect to happen?

That ':' would continue to have its default meaning of beginning an
extended (ex) command....

> If your strange editor
> doesn't do this, then perhaps you should change it ;-)

On the contrary if I wanted my editor to behave in such a way then I
would configure it to do so on purpose.  I would not program it to
blindly follow the tty setting and get itself into the kind of trouble
vi seems willing to do.

> 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.

Not in emacs mode....  :-)

> 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 ...

Hmmm....  that's not the case for 'sh' in any prior systems that I'm
running, nor in 1.4.1 or -current(1.4T), and I'd have reported it as a
bug if I'd discovered it in any other version!  All the systems I've
tried it on always treat '^W' as "kill-region" as the default, just as
in Emacs or most of its clones.

(I see there's a bug of this nature in ksh now though....)

> 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?

If you're in emacs mode then the emacs interpretation of ^W (i.e.
kill-region) should always prevail unless the you have explicitly
re-configured it using the applications key rebinding functionality
(assuming there is any).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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