[wellylug] Take a hint

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <12d175d704090702426d31835a at mail.gmail.com>, jumbophut writes:
>One question though -- apparently Ctrl-S is supposed to let you scroll
>back through the history (if you press Ctrl-R one too many times, for
>example), but on my machine, bash hangs when I do that.  Do you have
>this problem too?

/me checks the bash man page

Gosh, another[0] stunningly unfortunate choice on behalf of the GNU
project: ctrl-S (XOFF) is used as a flow control character on pretty
much every vaguely modern (ASCII speaking) terminal or virtual terminal
in existance.  I'm amazed that anyone thought that they could get away
with using it for something else without explicitly putting the terminal
into raw mode (eg, as is done in an editor or trn).

BTW, if you type ctrl-Q (XON) then the terminal will "unfreeze".

You may be able to work around this problem by turning off xon/xoff flow
control in the terminal in question before trying to use ctrl-S to
scroll forward, eg:

stty -ixon

but you'll need to do that for each terminal (or put it in a
terminal/shell setup script -- eg .bash_profile) for it to be effective.
And of course if you do that you won't be able to use ctrl-S/ctrl-Q to
pause/restart output in the terminal.

Ewen

[0] Using ctrl-H -- typically bound to the backspace key on many
    terminals/virtual terminal setups -- as the default binding for
    "help" in emacs was also a pretty unfortunate choice.