ksh in-line editing and speed questions

[Lennart Saaf]

I am currently a csh user and have twice tried unsuccessfully to switch
to ksh.  In my view the big bonuses of switching are the command
editing and the advertised speed improvement.  The system here is an
HP 9000/835.

First the speed issue.  The simple-minded speed test consists of
holding down the return key and seeing if the shell can keep up with
the repeats.  The Bourne shell is sufficiently fast to produce a
prompt an every line.  The c shell is not fast enough.  It produces a
prompt on about every sixth line.  When the return key is released it
spews out the backlogged prompts at a rate of about 3 per second.  The
performance of the Korn shell depends on whether the environmental
variables FCEDIT and EDITOR (or VISUAL) are defined.  Setting of these
variables seems to be the way to enable the in-line command editing
feature.  If these variables are not set, ksh appears to perform as
fast as sh.  If they are set (I tried both vi and emacs) the speed
goes like csh.  So it seems I can't get one of the nice features
without sacrificing the other.  I hope that I am missing something
that will let me have the best of both worlds, so I humbly ask the net
for assistance.

The second question concerns the in-line command editing feature.  I
would like to use my arrow keys in emacs instead of ctrl-p, etc.  Is
this possible?  I would assume that it might use a special startup
file with key bindings?

I will post a summary of the e-mail I receive.

Thanks in advance,
--
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| Len Saaf, The Institute of Optics, Univ. of Rochester, Rochester, NY |
| Internet: saaf at joker.optics.rochester.edu        Bitnet: SAAF at UOROPT |
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