All,

On Slack 10.2/current with bash, pressing ^u on the command-line kills the content from cursor to the beginning of the line, instead of killing the entire contents of the input. I have the proper stty ^u statement, but it seems like it's bash's ReadLine that needs configuration in the ~/.inputrc to tell it to kill the entire line, rather than just from cursor to start.

Does anyone have a sample entry in .inputrc that does this? I've played around with various set commands and "Control-u":kill-entire-line settings, but so far found none that work..

Thanks in advance, and Happy Holidays!

-Y1

in your .inputrc, try

"\C-u": kill-whole-line

enter ctrl-x ctrl-r to get the file re-read first

this may depend on how some other environment variables are set, but see how you go

tobyl

Thanks tobyl,

Unfortunately I've tried that and quite a few variants, and my ~/.inputrc (perm rwx) has tried both "\C-u": kill-whole-line and "Control-u":kill-whole-line, but none work. It keeps its "default" behaviour of killing from cursor to the beginning of the line, leaving the characters after the cursor.

Pressing ^E ^U works, as it first moves the cursor to the end, and then erases all infront, but that's not the behaviour I'm looking for here..

Additionally, it'd be nice to understand how this actually works, as I am only beginning to grasp how powerful the readline system is.

Could the emacs mode be part of the reason, rather than vi-mode?

Anyone else experiencing this ^u behaviour in bash?

-Y1

yes! I was playing around, and found that if you put the line I quoted in your .inputrc (i'm sure "Control-u":kill-whole-line is fine too)

then

set -o emacs

then ctrl-x ctrl-r as before, it works as you want

if I do
set | grep emacs
I get
SHELLOPTS=braceexpand:emacs:hashall:histexpand:history:interactive-comments:monitor=emacs

I think this is the important bit



if you use the set command it seems necessary to re-read the .inputrc

probably, because it is the default behaviour.
kill-whole-line is not bound by default to any key combination

(I only know this because your post got me curious)

tobyl

Also, I know that Ctrl-K kills everything from the cursor to the end of the line, so together with Ctrl-U, that kills the whole line, right? Perhaps there are other control sequences that do this better?

Tried the emacs options, and still can't get it to work. I know I can use ^E ^U or ^U ^K, but now I'm curious as to these bindings and would really like to understand how to harness the power of readline..

I'm set for emacs mode, and still ^U only kills from cursor to line-begin.

Any other useful information on my settings I should contribute?

Thanks again to all who helped so far!

-Y1