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Bash readline has a setting called blink-matching-paren that is not working for me. If I type an open parenthesis on the command line, then some text, then a close parenthesis I don't get any blinking. Parentheses matching does work for me in vim and emacs -nw.

Here are the settings and versions, etc.:

$ bind -v | grep blink-matching-paren
set blink-matching-paren on
$ set -o | grep -E '\<(emacs|vi)\>'
emacs           on
vi              off

Various combinations of:

  • Bash 4.0.33(1)-release
  • Bash 4.1.9(2)-release
  • Bash 3.2.51(24)-release
  • mintty 0.9.2
  • PuTTY 0.60 (with and without "Enable Blinking Text")
  • xterm 243
  • gnome-terminal 2.28.1
  • TERM=xterm
  • TERM=xterm-256color

What do I need to do to make parentheses matching work in Bash on the command line?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

Try setting that in .inputrc, like:

$ cat ~/.inputrc
set blink-matching-paren on

Somehow this setting does not work for me when set interactively, but works fine that way.

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1
  • That's just totally bizarre. It works. I added that and then did Ctrl-x Ctrl-r to re-read .inputrc and it worked. The weird thing is that bind -v showed that it was already set. By the way, try it with quotes from the command line: bind 'set blink-matching-paren on' - that works for me, too.
    – Dennis Williamson
    Commented Nov 22, 2010 at 20:28

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