Re: bash doesn't display user-typed characters; can interfere with COPY/PASTE

[Chet Ramey]

On 12/7/20 8:02 PM, L A Walsh wrote:

> The problem is that bash isn't displaying a 'tab' character where
> one was typed.  

It's readline and redisplay. Readline expands tabs to spaces using an
internal tab stop of 8. This allows it to be sure of the physical cursor
location, especially when you're doing things like wrapping lines, and
insulates it from varying terminal behavior.

> With many (most?) terminal windows these days, especially
> Unicode-enabled ones, the terminal has to read what is on the screen to
> be able to read the binary code of whatever is displayed on the screen,
> Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to read typed unicode.

This is not relevant to the issue.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/