[SOLVED] Re: Bizarre weirdness with del key and GNOME Terminal

[D. D. Brierton]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 19:13 +0000, D. D. Brierton wrote:

> Okay -- I've now determined the source of the problem but not a suitable
> workaround. I have a ~/.inputrc file with the following in it:
> 
> "\M-[A": history-search-backward
> "\M-[B": history-search-forward
> 
> That allows me to type the first couple of letters of a command and then
> use the up and down arrows to search for matches in my bash history. Now
> if I rename ~/.inputrc my delete key works properly again. But now I've
> lost the very useful functionality of being able to search through my
> bash history. So, what is the proper way to resolve this?
> 
> BTW, creating ~/.inputrc with the above two lines in it was based on a
> tip I got on this mailing list (or possibly the RHL9 list).

After a *lot* of googling I eventually found the answer. If you create a
~/.inputrc then /etc/inputrc is no longer read unless you include a
reference to it in ~/.inputrc. That is why my delete key stopped working
as I wanted it to. The solution is this new improved ~/.inputrc:

# Begin ~/.inputrc

# By default up/down are bound to previous-history
# and next-history respectively. The following does the
# same but gives the extra functionality where if you
# type any text (or more generally if there is any text
# between the start of the line and the cursor),
# the subset of the history starting with that text
# is searched.

"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[A": history-search-backward

# Include system wide settings which are ignored
# by default if one has their own .inputrc

$include /etc/inputrc

Hope this helps someone else out.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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