This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means.
Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?
Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice.
'^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible.
It’s from the dec terminal emulation, VT100. I think specifically when you connected to like an ansi type system with dec mode. Or something like that, the memories are fuzzy
The keystroke certainly does, but I was talking about people inserting ^h and ^w in the middle of conversations, which is a bit harder to nail down, though the practice is older than the parent thought.
Ah okay makes sense! It's amazing the gaps in knowledge I still have with a lot of things.
I've used Linux daily for like 15 years now, and I know about control characters, but since I never really used emacs (or readline beyond the copy+pasted command here or there) I just completely missed the meaning.
Not emacs (it means kill-region there, which deletes the text between the cursor and the mark and saves it in a holding area, fairly close to what windows does when you hit ^x, except the holding area is fancier).
This readline behavior follows a Unix tty driver. I'm not sure off the top of my head which one introduced it. I don't think it was on xenix but am pretty sure some 4.x bsd had it.
This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means.
Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?