From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-11-04T21:38:48+09:00
Subject: Re: irb problems on one-click windows installer

Robert Feldt wrote:

> I have a couple of students that use Ruby in a course and they've run 
> into a problem that is not my home ground since I don't run Ruby from 
> the one-click installer. But maybe some of you have seen this problem:
> 
> After installing the latest one-click installer irb works from the 
> standard windows command line prompt (cmd) but they say they cannot use 
> curly {} or normal braces [] so cannot try out code easily.

Another problem is that Ctrl-Left/Right don't do word-wise cursor 
movement. I know of no good way of fixing this (the issue seems to be 
readline not receiving the Ctrl-flag for cursor keys), but 
Alt-Left/Right can be mapped:

"\M-\e[D": backward-word
"\M-\e[C": forward-word

If anybody knows of a way to get Ctrl-Left/Right to work with cmd (I 
know it works with rxvt, but that usually isn't an option) I'd really 
like to know about it.

And irb doesn't even do anything when run with the --no-readline option 
for me. This is IMHO a big problem because readline support is only 
really needed when you want to use tab-completion anyway. (And I'm not 
even sure if tab-completion is worth it -- last time I checked it wasn't 
even intelligent about only listing methods that the object actually 
responds to...)

So I'd suggest that the --no-readline option of irb should disable 
readline support and that the one click installer should include a 
default .inputrc.