Re: Comint Newbie

[Kevin Rodgers]

Suttles, Andrew wrote:
> I've found that managing emacs *shell* buffers to be tremendously more
> useful than having many different CDE xwin terminals open, when working
> on several projects.  I'd like to customize the emacs shell environment
> to be more useful, but I'm having some trouble.
>
> I've added the following hook:
>
> (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook
>   '(lambda ()
>     ...snip...
>     (setq comint-input-ring-file-name "~/.sh_history")
>     (setq comint-input-ring-size 100)
>     (setq comint-input-ring-separator "\n")
>     (comint-read-input-ring)))
>
> This works to load my shell history when I enter a new *shell* buffer,
> however, there are many ^@, ^A, and ^B characters in the .sh_history
> file that are useful to the Korn shell history mechanism, but just get
> quoted at the prompt in emacs when I scroll through the history. Is
> there a way (a hook, or something) I can get rid of these.  I've played
> with the comint-input-ring-separator to no avail.

Looking at my ~/.sh_history file it seems the right setting would be:

(setq comint-input-ring-separator "\n\000")

because each line begins with a ^@.  Actually, some lines begin with
more than 1 ^@, and since comint-read-input-ring treats the separator
as a regexp (passing it to re-search-backward) you should be able to
handle that and the control characters you see like this:

(setq comint-input-ring-separator "\n[\000-\002]+") ; ^@, ^A, ^B

However, comint-write-input-ring does not treat the separator as a
regexp (passing it directly to insert), so that would break...

--
Kevin Rodgers