Re: comint-insert-input on non-command lines: A trivial fix, a quibble, and a bug

[Luc Teirlinck]

Nick Roberts wrote:

   There is also a comment by comint-use-prompt-regexp (also present in 21.3):

   ;; Note: If it is decided to purge comint-prompt-regexp from the source
   ;; entirely, searching for uses of this variable will help to identify
   ;; places that need attention.

Note that it says "If" not "When".  In as far as I know there has
never been a decision made to plan to remove comint-use-prompt-regexp
in the future.

I believe that comint-use-prompt-regexp serves two purposes:

1.  A customizable option for people who do not like some of the
    unintuitive (to them) aspects of fields in Comint buffers, like
    unusual behavior of many motion commands.  (For instance paragraph
    commands in shell mode.)

2.  Potentially a matter of necessity should the heuristic for
    distinguishing input from output used when comint-use-prompt-regexp
    is nil malfunction.  In that case the Comint derived mode can fall
    back on using regeps to recognize prompts.

Sincerely,

Luc.