Re: Readline Documentation

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/11/24 3:19 PM, John Devin wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Sorry in advance if this is poorly formatted; I used plain-text mode
> in gmail but who knows if that works properly.

It looks just fine.

> While hunting down some problems on a terminal, I ran across the
> option 'prefer-visible-bell'. It took me some time looking into this
> before finding out it was deprecated in favor of 'bell-style' about 20
> years ago, per:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2016-02/msg00186.html.

As the last line in that message says, it was never documented. Readline
didn't really even have documentation until version 2.1 in 1997, well
after bell-style.

> Despite that, it still shows up in stackoverflow answers and reddit
> threads even from as recently as six months ago:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/1b55k9f/that_stupid_bell/kt3l0hm/.
>
> Could this option be documented in the man page? 

As you said, it's been deprecated -- and undocumented -- for over 30 years
(and remains only for backwards compatibility). There's no reason to
document it.

> It would have saved
> me a bit of wasted time, and it would give me a resource to point to
> (other than an old mailing list thread) to authoritatively state it's
> been superseded.

It's been superseded. It's not just undocumented; it's not supposed to be
used. But there was no reason to break users' startup files, and that is
still true.

(Yes, I would have hoped usage would have dried up, but change is hard.)


 Is it non-functional now?

No.

> If so, is it synonymous
> with setting bell-style visual? 

Yes, setting it to on changes bell-style to visual.

And is setting it off synonymous with
> bell-style none?

No, it's a synonym for bell-style audible. That was the original meaning
of prefer-visible-bell.

One of the reasons I added bell-style in 1993 was to support `none' as a
value. Before that, you couldn't turn it off.

> Additionally, as discussed in the mail link above, I think the
> 'convert-meta' and 'input-meta' need slightly more description. For
> example, is this statement accurate: "The convert-meta variable has no
> effect if input-meta is off." From the manpage I would think so, but
> I'm just not confident. I also can't tell conclusively whether the
> output-meta variable is affected by convert-meta, or vice-versa.

Those descriptions have undergone fairly significant changes, the result
of this thread:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2024-08/msg00003.html

Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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