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I would like to map Ctrl-U to "kill line" when using Mathematica 9.0 in command line mode (i.e. not within the front end, but when called from a Unix command line by "math").

I am aware that (on a Mac) the directory /Applications/Mathematica.app/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/TextResources/Macintosh contains the file "KeyEventTranslations.tr", however this file seems to only affect the front end, not the behavior of the kernel when called from the command line.

I also know that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-G are already mapped to "Kill line" (although they don't seem to have corresponding entries in "KeyEventTranslations.tr"). But I would prefer to use Ctrl-U since this is what I am using in all other applications. (Note: Ctrl-U used to work in Math 8.0).

Mr.Wizard
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edgeloss
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1 Answers1

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According to a talk at the Wolfram Technical Conference last year, Mathematica 9's command-line interface now uses the GNU readline library. I believe that normally this library can be made to read its configuration settings from a file. However, in the talk (at about 23:00) he says that "currently they are hard coded, so it's a list of assignments, but ideally they should be read from a config file, so you should be able to reset to whatever you like." And on the screen it says "a user-defined config file is on TODO list." So my guess is that you are stuck with whatever he used until this is improved in a later version of Mathematica. If you really hate the new terminal input system (esp. on Windows, which already has its own superior keyboard editing support) you can get rid of it by deleting or renaming the file term.dll/libterm.so in SystemFiles/Kernel/Binaries/($SystemID).

librik
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    GNU readline is supposed to read ~/.inputrc, but it does not seem to be read by Mathematica. Removing ...Kernel/.../libterm.* does seem to work: it kills the Mathematica input system completely, and leaves the original one inherited from the shell. – edgeloss Aug 14 '13 at 04:21
  • 2022 and still no user-defined key bindings. Even after they released wolframscript as a standalone REPL. If you disassemble libterm.so you see there was supposed to be a term.conf file like term.hist but seems like it doesn't do anything. It doesn't seem to be gnu readline poking at the source, probably something homegrown. All actions are hardcoded, and e.g. there's no kill-word function even defined. But if you want to do code injection, you have access to the underlying buffer so you could implement your own. – 1110101001 Dec 11 '22 at 01:09