bug: readline quoting breaks "keyname: function-name or macro" style

[n8henrie]

Are you following the right branch?

• My Nixpkgs and Home Manager versions are in sync

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Issue description

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-Init-File-Syntax.html

The (IMO) much more readable alternative to the "keyseq" style as used in the example:

home-manager/modules/programs/readline.nix

Line 34 in 275ab72

{ "\\C-h" = "backward-kill-word"; }

would be: { Control-h = "backward-kill-word"; }

Unfortunately the current implementation quotes Control-h and outputs "Control-h", which doesn't work. Obviously one could still put it in extraConfig, but it would be nice if it didn't default to adding quotes that I didn't ask for.

I think it makes sense to expect users to explicitly escape quotes if they want them, since it seems equally valid and more readable to not have them in many cases.

home-manager/modules/programs/readline.nix

Line 24 in 275ab72

mkBindingStr = k: v: ''"${k}": ${v}'';

It seems like the most straightforward backward-compatible way to go about this would be adding a new option (keynames? unquotedBindings?) happy to make a PR if it seems reasonable.

Maintainer CC

@vojta001
@rycee

System information

- system: `"aarch64-darwin"`
 - host os: `Darwin 22.2.0, macOS 13.1`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `no`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.11.1`
 - channels(n8henrie): `"darwin, nixpkgs-22.11"`
 - channels(root): `""`
 - nixpkgs: `/Users/n8henrie/.nix-defexpr/channels/nixpkgs`

[ncfavier]

A simple heuristic would be to consider that a key is a keyseq if it contains a backslash, and a keyname otherwise. I'm pretty confident that keynames can't contain backslashes, less confident about the other way around unfortunately. Does it make sense at all to define a binding for a keyseq without any modifiers? EDIT: at least it seems to work...

If this can't be done I'd go with adding a new option keynameBindings.

[n8henrie]

Don't think that will always work. This is a valid keyseq:

"ab": "asdf"

EDIT: a then b work normally, holding a then hitting b inserts asdf.

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[hpfr]

#3947 does not fully resolve this. From the Readline manual:

A number of symbolic character names are recognized while processing this key binding syntax: DEL, ESC, ESCAPE, LFD, NEWLINE, RET, RETURN, RUBOUT, SPACE, SPC, and TAB.

The implementation in #3947 treats these character names as key sequences. For example, "TAB" = "menu-complete" binds menu-complete to the literal sequence T A B.

Just adding those names to the list at

home-manager/modules/programs/readline.nix

Lines 27 to 30 in d9b88b4

	builtins.elem (builtins.head (lib.splitString "-" (toLower k))) [
	"control"
	"meta"
	];

would probably fix it. Otherwise, it might just be best to have separate attributes for key names and key sequences.

[n8henrie]

True! I made some of these points in the discussion in the PR, and read (and believe i linked to) the manual as well.