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Date: Sat, 7 May 2011 19:24:26 +0100
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Subject: Re: Why doesn't ~/inputrc work
From: Andy Koppe <andy DOT koppe AT gmail DOT com>
To: moss AT cs DOT umass DOT edu, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
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On 28 April 2011 13:40, Eliot Moss wrote:
> I took a while to play around. One thing you may need to
> do is set the TERM environment variable to a proper, more
> capable, terminal (such as "cygwin").
>
> Beyond that, I found that I needed to:
>
> set convert-meta on

That's not a solution for everyone, because it makes it impossible to
enter characters beyond 7-bit ASCII. The setting means that input
bytes with the eighth bit set have that bit cleared and are prefixed
by an escape character instead.

> in my .inputrc and also to write the escape sequences as
> (for example):
>
> "\M-b": "echo meta b"

To make this work without enabling convert-meta, try using "\eb"
instead of "\M-B". Here's why: back in the olden days, character codes
were 7 bits wide, so there was one bit to spare in your usual 8-bit
byte, and the Meta modifier key could be used to set that. Then those
pesky foreign types came along and claimed the eigth bit for their
=C3=BCml=C3=A4=C3=BCts and other funny characters, which obviously collided=
 with the
Meta bit. Therefore, a different scheme became necessary to encode the
Alt (n=C3=A9e Meta) modifier: instead of setting the eighth bit, most
terminal emulators these days send an escape character prefix.
Inevitably, there's confusion on whether "Meta" should only refer to
ye olde eighth-bit scheme, or to the escape prefix scheme too.

In bash/readline's .inputrc without convert-meta on, the "\M-" refers
to the eighth-bit scheme only, so an Alt+b keypress sending Escape
followed by 'b' doesn't match "\M-b". In fact, with Cygwin's default
UTF-8 locale, a byte representing 'b' with the eighth bit set (i.e.
0xE2) actually constitutes an incomplete character sequence, hence
readline simply ignores such a key binding.

=C3=84ndy

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