[ksh93-integration-discuss] Small question about enabling the "multiline" mode...

[David Korn]

> Hi!
> 
> ----
> 
> Small question/request for/in April/Mike's direction:
> Should we enable the "multiline" mode (=an interactive input mode which
> renders a line which is longer then the terminal's width in the
> following line, e.g. start ksh93 via % ksh93 -o gmacs -o multiline #) in
> /etc/ksh.kshrc ?
> 
> IMO it may be usefull as it is less frustrating for beginners, is much
> closer to bash's behaviour and avoids trouble when writing longer lines
> at the command line, however there are (or were) small glitches (see
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ksh93-integration-discuss/2006-May/000293.
> html
> ; I am not sure whether David or Glenn looked at that problem yet) which
> may be annoying (the workaround is to press "<CTRL>L" to refresh the
> current line) ...
> ... I am not sure how to proceed here. The feature is valueable but I am
> not sure how often users would be hit by the problems described in my
> old posting. Can you test this (incl. an UTF-8 locale) and then think
> about whether we should enable this ?
>  
> ----
> 
> Bye,
> Roland
> 

The ksh93 editing does not use the termcap database for editing
operations.

The multiline option only works for terminals for which \E[A causes
the cursor to move up one line.  I suspect that this is not the case
for the terminal in your example.


I don't think that it would be compatbile to make this the
default at compile time, but you could put this into /etc/profile
for terminals that support \E[A.

You might also want to consider making globstar a default since
while this is not compatible with the shell standard, it is useful
and not likely to cause any problems.

David Korn
dgk at research.att.com