iraf.net

Dear IRAF people,Since ECL is still in beta, I have a couple of suggestions regarding the
command-line interface that I hope will be useful...First, I must say that the new readline interface is a huge improvement
on the old one, thanks!Second, having tab completion is very nice, but it does not seem to work
for foreign tasks. For example, if I type "ls ste<tab>", I get an error
"task `ls' has no param file". For ls, I can work around this either by
using IRAF's dir command or with an escape ("!ls ste<tab>" works), which
is slightly less convenient but still better than before. What's more of
an issue is "cd", which cannot be escaped because then it will not change
directory in the current shell. It would be excellent if it is possible
to make "cd comm<tab>" work as well (especially when observing)!Another thing is the key mapping for <meta-b> & <meta-f>. In EMACS on
Fedora, I can do <alt-b> and <alt-f> (or better still, <alt-arrow> to
move between words. In ECL, these keys don't seem to work, presumably
because the alt key isn't actually mapped to meta. I'm guessing that alt
can be redefined to do this in X, but I suspect that would break other
applications and it would be nice to have this behaviour work with the
default Linux key bindings (insofar as there is such a thing). Maybe on
some PCs, the "windows" keys are mapped to meta, but I don't have those
keys on my IBM laptop. In gnome-terminal, I can use <ctrl-arrow>, BTW,
but not in xgterm. Changing the ".inputrc" file doesn't seem to help.I haven't got as far as testing any serious stuff like error handling
yet, but that is certainly a fundamental improvement to the CL too...Thanks,James.--
James E.H. Turner
Gemini Observatory Southern Operations Centre,
Casilla 603, Tel. (+56) 51 205609
La Serena, Chile. Fax. (+56) 51 205650

Hi James,
Sorry for the slow reply. A number of people have found the
weaknesses of the tab-completion and I'll address those for the next
release of the ECL.
As for the key mappings, you should be able to handle all of
this with the .inputrc file but it appears that at least on some systems
(my RH9 for instance) the default file is /etc/inputrc and not the user's
~/.inputrc file unless an 'INPUTRC' environment variable is defined to
use it. I tried this an indeed I could remap the keys and change the
editing modes. The Meta key itself could be remapped as part of your
desktop environment, for example is it similarly broken using Bash?
Also, if you want custom settings for the .inputrc the application name
is "ECL", I think I might have left this out of the readme.
Hope this helps, please let me know if you find any more problems.Cheers,
-Mike