Re: About `M-C-e` expand result `'` failed

[Martin D Kealey]

On Sun, 4 Feb 2024, 02:01 Koichi Murase, <myoga.murase@gmail.com> wrote:

> I now think I should leave a comment because even Martin (who I believed
> was one of the careful people about backward compatibility as seen in
> [1,2]) seems to suggest a breaking change.
>

That's a fair point.

I am generally concerned about breaking changes that affect existing
scripts, but I see changes to readline as less problematic, since an
interactive user gets the chance to check the replacement before hitting
enter.

Yes users have to learn new behaviours, which isn't ideal, but if my
suggested "unquote" ("dequote"? "strip-quoting"?) bindable function was
also added, the impact on users would be minimal: press M-C-e and then a
second keypress to remove quotes, bringing the input buffer to the same
state as would occur under the current arrangement. (By choosing a default
binding for "unquote" that currently does nothing, people could then use
the same keyboard arpeggio on both old and new bash.)

If the requoting behavior would be desired, I strongly suggest keeping the
> existing behavior of shell-expand-line but adding a separate new
> bindable function (like shell-expand-and-requote-line) to perform the
> expansion and requoting.
>

On reflection, this would be a fair compromise, at least in the short term.

Might we offer guidance that distros include a new binding for C-M-e in
their supplied /etc/skel which would only affect new users, not existing
users?

-Martin