Re: need help diagnosing readline issue under cygwin rxvt

[David Bateman]

Matt Hortman wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a longtime matlab user and I've recently been giving Octave a shot
> and I have to say that I like what I see.  My adviser was also
> impressed and might be recommending it to his students...
>
> I have Octave 3.0.0 for Windows installed (via the octave-forge
> installer) on Windows XP SP2.
>
> Running Octave from the installed shortcut works great.  Inside the
> octave session the command line editing works as advertised (up/down
> arrows, tab, etc).
>
> However, I want to run Octave inside of cygwin rxvt (from a zsh
> prompt) but when I do this, the up/down arrow and tab keys do not
> behave correctly.  Up/down arrows simply move up and down on the
> screen and the tab key inserts an actual tab...
>
> In fact, running with no command line options, I get the startup
> messages but it doesn't print a prompt (although I can type commands).
>  I have to specify the "-i" option to get the prompt to display.
> Specifying "--line-editing" as well does not change anything.
>
> I have the latest version of cygwin installed (as of yesterday).
> I do NOT have the cygwin octave package installed.
> The up/down arrows and tab work correctly at the zsh prompt.
> The pager (less) is also not working inside rxvt but I don't really
> care about that.
>
> I'm not sure what the next step is for diagnosing this problem.
> Octave appears to think it is in batch mode when started inside rxvt.
> Is this something strange with the stdin/out provided by zsh/rxvt or
> readline misbehaving?  Is octave detecting that it is running inside
> the console and taking actions based on that?
>
> thanks,
>
>   
Are you sure you have the cygwin rxvt and not the mingw one? There are
well known issue in the ptty emulation in mingw that essentially break
readline. If you don't like the cmd.exe window of the Octave binary then
I'd suggest using the ckw console discussed in the thread

http://www.nabble.com/ckw-mod-:-Light-console-software-may-be-used-for-the-Octave-for-Windows-tt14782652.html

as then you wouldn't need cygwin (which is a bit heavy, given that
Octave itself doesn't need it).

D.


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