Feature request: ctrl-w instant erase, similar to bserase

[joohing]

Hey, thanks for your work on OpenVi, I use it daily!

I'd love for there to be a feature which enables instant erase when using ctrl-w and ctrl-u, similar to how you can enable bserase.

[johnsonjh]

@joohing Hi!

Yes - I don’t see why that wouldn’t be something worth implementing. I’m open to a suggestion for the name too. Give me a couple days!

[joohing]

Actually, maybe it would be worth it to lump it into the same feature as bserase, and then just call it instanterase. I think having the two as separate features would "cover the same ground twice". But of course changing the meaning of bserase would also compromise with backwards compatibility.

Otherwise, in the same way that bserase is named in relation to the key for which the setting enables instant erasing, you could just name it ctrlwerase. I think users of bserase would likely know what that does just by reading the name. :)

[johnsonjh]

@joohing I’m on my phone so I didn’t really test it, but please tell me if the branch master...20251008/johnsonjh/bserase does what you want. I’ll test more extensively later.

Since “bserase” is an OpenVi extension (and not adopted by upstream OpenBSD at this time) we have a bit more wiggle room for modifications, but I also don’t like the idea of breaking compatibility, so I think I would prefer to have a new option for this, rather than extending bserase or renaming it.

But I’ll have to think on it a bit more.

[joohing]

Branch appears to work pretty nicely!