bash does not honor ~/.inputrc

Question

under the latest macos

$ sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.15.6
BuildVersion:   19G73

i am using the latest bash (installed via brew)

$ $SHELL --version
GNU bash, version 5.0.18(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin19.5.0)
Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

and bash is defined as the default shell (chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash + reboot)

$ which $SHELL
/usr/local/bin/bash

$ cat /etc/shells | tail -n 1
/usr/local/bin/bash

to customize bash, i have ~/.inputrc

$ ls -l ~/.inputrc
-rw------- 1 foo staff 1432 Jan 21  2020 /Users/foo/.inputrc

that holds the following

set completion-ignore-case on
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[A": history-search-backward

i used to be able to reverse-search using case-insensitive, but now it stopped working.

even tried to run set completion-ignore-case on and bind 'set completion-ignore-case on' directly in the terminal but it did not solve my issue.

1. is there a bug in the bash version that i am using?
2. how can i tell whether bash honors ~/.inputrc?
3. how do you recommend to debug the issue?

Answer 1

after examining the issue under linux, i realized that the issue is not macos specific.

searching the internet harder, i found the solution

you can't get this feature in BASH at present because this feature hasn't been built yet into vi or emacs mode. As I commented above completion-ignore-case only applies to completion, not to isearch

~10 years after the accepted answer, it seems that it is still the case.

references:

• Find out corresponding escape sequence for a given key combo
• Search for a previous command with the prefix I just typed
• In bash, how do I bind a function key to a command?

Answer 2

SOLVED! macOS Catalina version: 10.15.7

According to the readline manual, ~/.inputrc should essentially, auto-initialize by bash.

This didn't initially work for me. What finally worked was adding the bind -f ~/.inputrc to ~/.bash_profile. Also, remember to install readline using brew install readline

I also tried without success:

1. Upgrading to bash 5 using brew - did Not auto-initialize ~/.inputrc
2. Compiling locally a version of bash5 using brew install --HEAD bash - did Not work
3. Adding the bind command to ~/.bashrc - did not work on bash3 or bash5

Answer 3

Now that zsh is the default shell, you can add this to ~/.zshrc to get .inputrc up/down functionality.

bindkey "\e[A" history-beginning-search-backward
bindkey "\e[B" history-beginning-search-forward

For more information, see My .zshrc file on Mac (adapted from .bashrc and .inputrc).

Answer 4

Don't have enough reputation to comment: but a possible issue is that when readline is installed by Homebrew it is installed as keg only so you need to brew link --force readline to make it visible to bash. This worked for me. Unfortunately, the Homebrew bash bottles only use the default configure options so it is not possible to use the readline included with the bash source with ./configure --without-installed-readline which is what I have always done until I decided to use Homebrew.