Julia: repl: vi editing mode for Julia

[brauner]

Hello,

I am on arch linux. I try to set up Julia to use vi editing mode in a repl session but that somehow doesn’t work. I set set -o vi in my ~/.bashrc and set editing-mode vi,
set keymap vi-command in my ~/.inputrc. But somehow Julia doesn’t pick up on that. I compiled Julia from source with all dependencies in a directory. It does not use any system provided libraries apart from pcre 8.35-1. (Because pcre will fail tests with the recent version of gcc (4.9).) Other repls like R or Python do respect vi editing mode. Is there a way to get Julia to use vi editing?

[ivarne]

I have the following in my .profile file

export JULIA_EDITOR=vim

, but I can't find the documentation for that now.

[brauner]

Unfortunately, your solution doesn’t work for me. I wonder what is causing this.

[MichaelHatherly]

Do you mean the behaviour provided by GNU Readline [1]? Julia's REPL used to use Readline but that was replaced by a pure Julia implementation in #6270, so there's probably no vi mode unless I've missed something.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-vi-Mode.html

[brauner]

Yes, I was talking about GNU Readline. Thanks so much for the link Michael that helped a lot. Does this bear on the README entry where it is stated that Shift-Return can be set to insert a linefeed rather than evaluate the command in ~/.xmodmaprc?

[mbauman]

Yes, that is outdated. See #6775. There is now no difference between \r and \n; use meta-Enter to insert a newline.

[MichaelHatherly]

Thanks for clarifying that @mbauman.

[kmsquire]

While I don't use vi mode myself, I think this could remain open as a feature request.

[mbauman]

Agreed. I think it's a decent up-for-grabs kind of issue. The backend for adding custom user keybindings is already there; it just needs to be exposed by an API. Adding the extra layer of vi's modality (switching keymaps on insert and command modes) would be a much bigger challenge, but I think it'd be doable for an intrepid vi user.

[brauner]

Agreed.

[bfredl]

An alternative might be to use vim-ipython together with IJulia. For me it seems to work pretty well but with some quirks as vim-ipython assumes a python kernel. See ivanov/vim-ipython#74

[oxinabox]

Should be possible to use rlwrap (https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap -- you should be able to apt-get it , iirc) to wrap julia back inside GNU readline, getting back vi mode.

[jakebolewski]

While vi bindings would be cool, I doubt they would ever get shipped with Base. Adding a vi mode to the REPL deserves to be in a package.

[samoconnor]

vi mode would be great

[jstac]

+1
would love to have vi mode.

[jeromekelleher]

Also +1 for vi keybindings.

[StefanKarpinski]

The hooks already exist for creating a vi mode via a package. Someone just needs to write that package.