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 ümläüts and other funny characters, which obviously collided with the Meta bit. Therefore, a different scheme became necessary to encode the Alt (née 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. Ändy -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
