Re: Patches item #1729825 ready to go.

[<pl...@pi...>]

On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:52:00 +0200, Daniel J Sebald  
<dan...@ie...> wrote:

> Petr Mikulik wrote:
>>> I thought it was just an annoying bug that some of my commands seemed  
>>> to
>>> disappear. I never figured out any rhyme or reason to it.
>>>
>>> I strongly request that the default history behaviour is to leave
>>> all my commands in place.  I would consider this a bug-fix.
>>>
>>> I want it to behave like the csh [and tcsh and bash] history commands.
>>> Go with what the users expect.
>>
>>
>> I'm strongly against your proposal.
>>
>> Well, it was my first patch to gnuplot ages ago, to remove the repeated
>> commands from the stack. I was so upset in a long night experiment at  
>> the
>> ESRF having to hit dozen of times up-arrow before the actual plotting
>> command appeared, that I started hacking gnuplot...
>>
>> I never used history to report what exactly I was doing. I need it to
>> quickly go through the commands and have them available for editing, or  
>> with
>> the "history" command to paste them via mouse.
>
> I've programmed the condensed version during display rather than tossing  
> out
> redundant commands and that was *so* much easier.  The only difference  
> is that
> the up-arrow that you mention, Petr, will still have to go through the  
> full
> list.  (I could probably reprogram that as well to skip redundancy.)
>
> I think it is easy enough to enable both with an option (full history  
> stack,
> default).  In fact, I'd propose to deprecate
>
>    set historysize
>
> in exchange for
>
>    set history {#(size)} {condensed|full} {quiet|numbered}
>
> Picking syntax to reflect exactly the variables in gnuplot code  
> inherently
> limits future flexibility.
>
> Then, as part of the history command, one could override the settings  
> with
>
>    hi #
>    hi full num
>
> and such.
>
> Here are some other features I think worth having:
>
> 1)  history clear
>
> to clear out the history stack in case someone *does* want to use  
> history like a
> recording devise.
>
> 2) Some method of stepping through the history hunks at a time, say 10  
> or 20?  I
> don't know.  It's just that some people really like working solely from  
> the
> keyboard as much as possible.  For example, I explained before that I  
> don't like
> the fact the first plot in X11 terminal always grabs focus so that I  
> have to
> take my hand off the keyboard and press the mouse button to get back to  
> the
> command line.  (I know, figure out what the window manager key sequence  
> is to
> push focus one window back.)
>
> Dan
>

I'm not quite sure what circumstances Petr felt so annoying that inspired  
him to modify this but as a user I think this should be a true (bash like)  
history not a filtered one.

The history command should supply the history, a record of recent commands.

It would probably make more sense to provide some switch like  
history:nodulpes ( !:nd ) that does what Petr wants to see. This would  
follow the syntax of shell history functions like !:p

Hope that can satisify both needs.

;)