The readline "()-matching" dance

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Aug-1997, Ted Harding <address@hidden> wrote:

| In octave-2.0.8 (and presumably 2.0.9) when you type in an expression with
| (...) and [...], the cursor hops back brieflly to the matching ( or [ when
| you type a ) or ].
| 
| I can see the use of this (and it has saved me from an error or two),
| but since each hop takes about 1 second it "cuts my rhythm" when typing a
| long and complex expression, since I have to synchronise with this little
| dance; otherwise my visual feedback gets out of phase with my digital
| output, leading to cognitive confusion.
| 
| Is there any way of either suppressing this, or at any rate speeding it
| up?

I believe the cursor blink delay is set to one second, but if you just
continue typing, the delay should be cancelled and character insertion
or cursor motion should happen immediately.  If that doesn't happen
for you, please send a bug report about this to the readline maintainer.

To completely turn the feature off, add

  set blink-matching-paren 0

to your ~/.inputrc file.

jwe