Hi Cameron,
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 04:59, Cameron Simpson <cs(a)zip.com.au> wrote:
Might your terminal emulator settings have changed?
I use Terminal (the XFCE terminal app) as my terminal emulator. I looked
at its settings file, and everything seemed to be the way I have set it
(I haven't touched this file in over a year). That said, I think
Terminal is to blame here. I tried bash on xterm, and everything worked
just the way it should.
Possibilities:
Alt and Meta are actually distinct keys in the X11 keyboard model;
this association may have been changed.
How do I check this in my case?
Terminal emulators choose to associate Alt and Meta too. Maybe your
terminal emulator config has changed.
Some how Terminal is choosing to ignore the Alt key. When I try to quote
say Alt+1 with Ctrl+v, I only get 1.
Ctrl-S is "XOFF" - cease output - when flow control is on
on a
terminal/serial device (and terminals _are_ serial devices:-).
Readline probably turns this off, but may not. If Ctrl-S doesn't
prevent other typing, you can probably ignore this idea.
Ctrl-s seems to do nothing in my case. But as I mentioned in response to
Ranjan, this particular binding probably has never worked for me.
Check your newly created user - be sure there is no default
.inputrc.
And isn't there a system wide inputrc, maybe in /etc?
The new user doesn't have an ~/.inputrc. I checked the global
/etc/inputrc, there seemed no out of the ordinary settings.
Check that you're using "emacs" command line editing;
bash may only
offer that, but zsh at least has a "vi" mode command line editing
as well, which would break the mappings you expect.
The global inputrc has these lines:
...
set meta-flag on
set input-meta on
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on
...
$if mode=emacs
...
"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word
"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word
...
$endif
And using bind I see I am using emacs mode:
$ bind -v | grep emacs
set editing-mode emacs
set keymap emacs
Do other readline capable programs also fail?
When run inside Terminal, they fail (e.g. python, zsh). But inside xterm
they work as expected.
I guess the problem is clear, Terminal has somehow changed. Maybe there
is some obscure settings somewhere which got changed somehow. I'll ask
on the fedora XFCE list.
Cheers,
Thanks a lot for all the suggestions. They were very helpful.
--
Suvayu
Open source is the future. It sets us free.