Re: [PATCH] Add option to remove duplicate command history entries

[Patrick Palka <patrick at parcs dot ath dot cx>]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 06/04/2015 05:21 PM, Patrick Palka wrote:
>> This patch implements the new option "history remove-duplicates", which
>> controls whether GDB should remove duplicate command-history entries
>> (off by default).
>>
>> The motivation for this option is to be able to reduce the prevalence of
>> basic commands such as "up" and "down" in the history file.  These
>> common commands crowd out more unique commands in the history file (when
>> the history file has a fixed size), and they make navigation of the
>> history file via ^P, ^N and ^R more inconvenient.
>>
>
> Did you consider bash's erasedups and ignoredups?  Specifically,
> this seems to implement something like erasedups, and I'm wondering
> how you'd fit in ignoredups in this option's UI.  Might be good to
> prepare for it with an enum instead, something like:
>
>   "set history duplicates ignore|erase|leave"
>
> WDYT?

An "ignoredups" option currently seems not useful in GDB since we
already have the empty-command shorthand for running the previous
command again, which does not add to the history.  But if we ever make
the empty-command shorthand toggle-able then an "ignoredups"
equivalent could be useful when the shorthand is turned off.  I am
actually thinking about implementing that too, since I do not like the
shorthand very much and would like to be able to turn it off.  So I
might as well implement "ignoredups" too.

>
> (haven't looked at the patch yet)
>
> Thanks,
> Pedro Alves
>