How to get history working in bash on windows

Question

I've installed vifm in bash on ubuntu on windows using

apt-get install vifm

and am pleased to see that it basically works but there seems to be no command history

There is no .vifm/vifminfo file created (though there is a vifmrc, Trash etc).

The output from vifm --version is...
vifm 0.4

Do I need a later version perhaps?

TIA

Dan

Answer 1

Do I need a later version perhaps?

Yes, definitely. v0.4 is very old, buggy, lacks many things and configuration is completely different there.

If that's all they have, you might need to build vifm from source package. Instructions are here. You'll need a build tools though, like gcc, I think there was a package like "build-essentials" to install them.

Comments

Ah sorry, :nmap outputs "go to item below"

and locale says...

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

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OK, I reproduced it. Looks like it happens for me only if I open cmd window and start bash from there and do not change focus on another window (all of this is weird).

I'm bisecting to see what might be the cause, but for now try starting bash in some different way. And I get wrong box characters for fixed font, but all is fine for couriel new or consolas.

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There is line 178 at src/ui/ui.c:

set_escdelay(0);

Replace 0 with 5, this should fix it.

It works as is on most systems because they insert all bytes atomically, apparently it's not the case here. Generally speaking the delay might be useful on other systems in corner cases as well and shouldn't be noticeable, so I'll probably make this change for all systems.

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Well, bash on windows was bound to be weird! My prompt was run from the standard icon that has target: C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe ~

However, I did an apt-get upgrade before getting your latest reply and this seems to have sorted it. It upgraded these packages...
bind9-host:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12), liblwres90:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12), libdns100:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12), libisccfg90:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12), libbind9-90:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12), dnsutils:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12), libisccc90:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12), libisc95:amd64 (9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.11, 9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.12)

I've made your code change and re-built for completeness but my suspicion is that bash on ubuntu on windows is a little flaky,

Thanks for investigating,

Dan

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There is more to its weirdness. After it starts working (also happens if you run another application, not just vifm), it works until you restart the bash. This might explain how upgrading "fixed" it.