On 9/11/24 3:19 PM, John Devin wrote:
Hello all,Sorry in advance if this is poorly formatted; I used plain-text mode in gmail but who knows if that works properly.
It looks just fine.
While hunting down some problems on a terminal, I ran across the option 'prefer-visible-bell'. It took me some time looking into this before finding out it was deprecated in favor of 'bell-style' about 20 years ago, per: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2016-02/msg00186.html.
As the last line in that message says, it was never documented. Readline didn't really even have documentation until version 2.1 in 1997, well after bell-style.
Despite that, it still shows up in stackoverflow answers and reddit threads even from as recently as six months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/1b55k9f/that_stupid_bell/kt3l0hm/.Could this option be documented in the man page?
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.
It would have saved me a bit of wasted time, and it would give me a resource to point to (other than an old mailing list thread) to authoritatively state it's been superseded.
It's been superseded. It's not just undocumented; it's not supposed to be used. But there was no reason to break users' startup files, and that is still true. (Yes, I would have hoped usage would have dried up, but change is hard.) Is it non-functional now? No.
If so, is it synonymouswith setting bell-style visual?
Yes, setting it to on changes bell-style to visual. And is setting it off synonymous with
bell-style none?
No, it's a synonym for bell-style audible. That was the original meaning of prefer-visible-bell. One of the reasons I added bell-style in 1993 was to support `none' as a value. Before that, you couldn't turn it off.
Additionally, as discussed in the mail link above, I think the 'convert-meta' and 'input-meta' need slightly more description. For example, is this statement accurate: "The convert-meta variable has no effect if input-meta is off." From the manpage I would think so, but I'm just not confident. I also can't tell conclusively whether the output-meta variable is affected by convert-meta, or vice-versa.
Those descriptions have undergone fairly significant changes, the result of this thread: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2024-08/msg00003.html Chet -- ``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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