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Re: Browsing the history of commands. Inconsistency between Bash and Ema


From: Chet Ramey
Subject: Re: Browsing the history of commands. Inconsistency between Bash and Emacs
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 21:23:33 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.3.0

On 2/13/14, 9:40 AM, Dani Moncayo wrote:
> Hello, Bash developers,
> 
> (I know little about Bash, so I apologize beforehand if I say
> something inaccurate or nonsensical)
> 
> Bug #16740 was filed today against the Emacs package, asking to remove
> an inconsistency between the keys employed by Emacs and Bash to browse
> the history of commands.  See:
> 
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2014-02/msg01082.html
> 
> Emacs uses M-p/M-n to browse the minibuffer history (and C-p/C-n to
> move to the previous/next line in a multi-line buffer), whereas Bash
> uses C-n/C-p for browsing the command history (and doesn't use M-p/M-n
> for anything, AFAIK).

I said in an earlier message that the two programs use different mental
models.  Here's what I meant.

Readline is one-dimensional: everything it deals with is a line.  Emacs
is two-dimensional: there is a (logical) array of lines presented a
screenful at a time.  Emacs uses C-p and C-n to move between lines; even
when in a shell minibuffer, C-p and C-n can be used to move around
previous command output.  Since readline is one-dimensional, the way you
add a second dimension is through the history.  It doesn't, and can't,
know anything about the rest of the screen's contents.  It's only concerned
with the current line.  Readline uses C-p and C-n to move up and down
through its units of lines: the history.  This is consistent.

Emacs needed a different set of key bindings to move through the history,
and it chose M-p and M-n.  Users who want that kind of consistency can
easily bind M-p and M-n to previous-history and next-history, respectively.

> It would be nice to remove this inconsistency (this is the obvious
> part), and IMO TRT would be to make Bash behave like Emacs, that is:
> 1. Use M-p/M-n to browse the command history (instead of the current C-p/C-n).
> 2. Use C-p/C-n to move to the previous/next line, in the current
> command being edited.

No.  The use of C-p and C-n for this is pervasive and long-lived.  There is
no reason to break 25 years of backwards compatibility and compatibility
with other shells to make this change.

I'm not opposed to looking at a readline command to move through physical
lines of a line containing embedded newlines (rare) or a line exceeding the
screen width that ends up getting wrapped (common), as long as such a
command can be specified and implemented.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    address@hidden    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/



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