On 9/13/24 11:00 AM, John Devin wrote:
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 There's no reason to document it.I understand it's been superseded, but I do want to point this out: running `bind -v` in bash 5.2.21 right now still lists 'set prefer-visible-bell on' in its output.
Sure, the variable corresponding to the option has a default value -- all variables do. That variable is literally never used.
I considered that maybe it would only do this in response to being set directly, but neither ~/.bashrc nor /etc/bash.bashrc on my system include it, nor any other file I can find. Unless this has been changed between that version and now, it means bash is currently reporting a variable with no way to discover what it means or what its effects are without changing it and testing.
It has no effects in its default state. If you don't change it, nothing happens. If you change it, you change `bell-style' instead.
The fact that its usage continues suggests documenting it asdeprecated would be beneficial.
Maybe. Or maybe it's just time to remove it once and for all.
Many of the stackoverflow/reddit/etc discussions I found while looking into this included people using both 'bell-style' and 'prefer-visual-bell' simply because they didn't know what one meant, and then keeping both in their config once they found the combination that did what they wanted. Essentially, I think it's being cargo-culted. The fact that `bind -v` still reports it certainly doesn't help.
Did these discussions note that it's not documented?
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
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