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>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it m
by Klathmon 8y ago
>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy
This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means.
Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?
- SteveCoast 8y agoDelete word.
- q3k 8y agoEmacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice. '^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible. It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.
- Klathmon 8y agoAh okay makes sense! It's amazing the gaps in knowledge I still have with a lot of things. I've used Linux daily for like 15 years now, and I know about control characters, but since I never really used emacs (or readline beyond the copy+pasted command here or there) I just completely missed the meaning.
- bluedino 8y agoSlashdot posters would use ^H^H in their posts (backspace)
- lscotte 8y agoIt goes back way further than that - probably to the dawn of IRC or so.
- pjscott 8y agoI believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than IRC.
- TheCondor 8y agoIt’s from the dec terminal emulation, VT100. I think specifically when you connected to like an ansi type system with dec mode. Or something like that, the memories are fuzzy
- lscotte 8y agoThe keystroke certainly does, but I was talking about people inserting ^h and ^w in the middle of conversations, which is a bit harder to nail down, though the practice is older than the parent thought.
- mark-r 8y ago^H was backspace on teletypes, which probably dates back to the 1960's.
- yuubi 8y agoNot emacs (it means kill-region there, which deletes the text between the cursor and the mark and saves it in a holding area, fairly close to what windows does when you hit ^x, except the holding area is fancier). This readline behavior follows a Unix tty driver. I'm not sure off the top of my head which one introduced it. I don't think it was on xenix but am pretty sure some 4.x bsd had it.
- Angostura 8y agoIn days of yore the joke was always ^H^H after IBM/DEC backspace v delete confusion
- aeneasmackenzie 8y ago^W deletes the last word in readline.
- dorfsmay 8y agoIn readline in emacs mode (yes you can switch deadline in vi mode)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- otabdeveloper2 8y ago"^W" is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-Transmission-Block_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-Transmission-Block_char... In Unix line editors it is traditionally used to mean 'erase the previous word'. See also documentation for ASCII (http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html for example) for origins of ^C, ^D, ^S, etc.
- nonamenoslogan 8y agoAs an HP3000 programmer I still refer to this link fairly often. Ah MPE, its a strange one.
- lemoncucumber 8y agoIt’s used the same way strikethrough is used, for reasons others have explained.