Terminal with parenthesis matching (highlight)

[terdon]

Hi all,
I write a lot of short scripts on the fly at the command line. Basically perl one liners, but I often get carried away and end up having several lines of code. Is there any terminal app out there that can do emacs or vi style parenthesis and brackets highlighting?

[DaithiF]

well why not use vi as your line editing mode (set -o vi)

then when typing a long command, hit ESC and v brings your line into vi where you can edit to your hearts content (including brace matching) before :wq exits back to the shell and runs your command

[terdon]

grrrrr I've managed to stick to emacs and avoid vi for the past decade! You're telling me I have to betray my principles!?? Real programmers use emacs and all that.... Is there a way to do the same with emacs instead?

In any case, joking apart, thanks for the answer. I'll give it a try.

[skillet-thief]

Or use one of the shell modes in emacs, shell or eshell. You get parenthesis matching for free, and you can easily move over to a buffer in cperl-mode if you need to.

[terdon]

Or use one of the shell modes in emacs, shell or eshell. You get parenthesis matching for free, and you can easily move over to a buffer in cperl-mode if you need to.

OK, that sounds interesting. I'm not sure what you mean though. Will I need to copy/paste between the terminal and an emacs window? Open a command line emacs? How would I execute the command once I am done writing it?

[CharlesA]

Try this:

set -o emacs

I don't know if it'll work, but worth a shot, I suppose.

[terdon]

Well, I tried both set -o vi and emacs and neither seems to be doing anything. Will this work for bash or is it specific to Korn shell?

[CharlesA]

It's a bash shell environment varable as far as I know.

[terdon]

Actually, set -o vi seems to do something. I seem to be in a vi environment (I had to type i to edit) and :wq got me back to my command. Ok, so far so good, but there was no brace matching.

set -o emacs got me back to my (normal?) mode, where Ctrl+K kills a line, Ctrl=W a word etc etc.

[CharlesA]

So.. is that.. good?

I stick to vi mostly, since I'm not fond of emacs.