Joseph Kowalski wrote: > > > From: Joseph Kowalski <Joseph.Kowalski at eng.sun.com> > .. > > > gmacs is considered an intuitive beginner's editing mode. It is the > > > default editing mode in bash and more or less matches the common input > > > mode of various GUI toolkits and desktops, including Gnome/GTK+, > > > KDE/Qt, CDE/Motif, Mozilla/XULRunner/Gecko, JAVA, and Xaw/Xaw3D. > > > > None the less, this seems like a strange choice for Solaris as there isn't > > anything called "gmacs" on the system. > .. > > I think I would be more inclinded to be accepting of gmacs if it was the > > common default mode for ksh on other systems. Is it? > > Or alternately, why isn't the best choice to either not ship the file > or (probably better) to ship it empty? I fully understand the motivation > to allow an easily modifiable system wide default, but why should we > empose a style judgement on everybody?
Umpf... because the ksh93 "default" is that no editor mode is enabled, leaving beginners completely puzzled how to proceed. The whole addition of /etc/ksh.kshrc is about improving _USUABILITY_. Please ask yourself: Why prefer people "bash" ? The answer is: Because it is a shell which is very easy to use. It has "working cursor keys" and is quite intuitive to use. I really like to do the same for ksh93 to improve the usuability of Solaris - the old Solaris ksh is really hated by both admins and users for not having "working cursor keys"&&history. We can't use "bash"'s solution of doing this via a builtin setting because this would violate the POSIX standard (which requires that all "set -o flags" are off by default (excluding any settings made after the shell started and reads it's startup files (like /etc/profile, /etc/ksh.kshrc, ~/.kshrc etc.))) - instead we use the file which was originally invented to handle this kind of settings: /etc/ksh.kshrc ---- Bye, Roland -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090 (;O/ \/ \O;)
