When punching away at the keyboard on the octave command line, I sometimes find that the various readline shortcuts stop working, e.g. C-a and C-e just insert ^A and ^E.
It took me a while to realize that this is because I've accidentally switched to vi-editing-mode, and indeed there's is a toggle-editing-mode (C-M-j) documented in an old version of the octave manual.
My question is, how do I return to emacs-mode? I can't find any shortcut listed anywhere.
After much web-searching and manipulation of ~/.inputrc, I accidentally found that C-e in vi-command mode actually does the trick and executes emacs-editing-mode. This is discussed in this posting, but with regards to bash, they must be related somehow, but I can't find how by looking in the octave sources.
Knowing what to look for also allowed me to find, one way to change this binding through ~/.inputrc:
$if mode=emacs
set keymap vi
"\e\C-j": emacs-editing-mode
"\C-x\C-r": re-read-init-file
set keymap emacs
$endif
Anyway, seems I should be reading readline.info and perhaps also history.info.
Added C-M-j as a vi binding to switch back to emacs, in addition to the default C-e. Also added a vi-binding to re-read ~/.inputrc.
