bfox@AUREL.CALTECH.EDU (Brian Fox) (09/23/89)
James sent me this message, and I thought that the answer would be of general interest. Date: Fri, 22 Sep 89 11:58:58 EDT From: James J Dempsey <jjd@alexander.bbn.com> When bash 1.03 first came out I sent a message describing several bugs, one of which was that often bash drops the first few characters on a line or even misorders them. Later you sent out a message in reply to a reply to my message which said something like "I fixed these and will send patches" but I am confused if this dropped characters bug was included in that statement. I haven't seen any patches for it. Is this one of the bugs you found and will be fixed in 1.04? Yes, I found and fixed this bug right away. I didn't post patches right away, which had indeed been my intent. Since then I have completed a major rewrite of the readline library, and the patches would be meaningless. I tend to be slow to release a piece of software unless I think it is perfect. Since I know that Bash is not yet perfect, I am slow to release it. Then, people yell at me to release something, anything, and I rush to get in the last new feature. This invariably means that the last new feature has bugs in it, and the cycle starts over again. I believe that I am getting better about this, but it is happening slowly, over time, so please bear with me. The rewrite of readline contains: * Multi-level keymaps (e.g. C-x 4 f). Among other things, this means that the arrow-key people will be able to make key bindings. * Keyboard macros. C-x ( and C-x ), and syntax for binding keys to a macro. * Reasonably full Vi mode (can be #ifdef'd out). This was mostly written by Jeff Sparkes (jeff1@garfield.mun.edu), with minimal modifications and merging by me. This Vi mode "feels" like Vi to me; it drives me nuts in the ways that I am used to Vi driving me nuts. * More flexibilty in init files. This includes: conditional parsing of key bindings dependent on which program is running (e.g. Bash, Gdb). binding of arbitrary length key sequences, and binding to macros. The syntax for init files has expanded to include Emacs style key specifications: "\C-x\C-r": re-read-init-file * Yes, you can re-read your init file now. P.S. The other day I had a file named something like 'foo bar' and I was real impressed when I typed: rm "foo<tab> and it completed to rm "foo bar" Great! Thanks! Brian