MrBayes 3.2.6 Linux箭头键不起作用

Question

Not sure this is the best place to ask for this, but since the other MrBayes questions were also posted here, I'll give it a try.

So I'm trying to run MrBayes on Arch Linux (4.4.1-2-ARCH) and the program works fine but the arrow keys don't work.

The output for the arrow keys looks like this:

MrBayes > ^[[A^[[C^[[B^[[D

In the terminal (xterm etc.) the arrow keys work just fine.

Googling this turned up nothing... Any idea why this happens?

Answer 1

Arrow keys on almost all terminals send escape sequences. If a program handles arrow keys, it does this by noticing that an escape character is read, and follows up by looking for the rest of the escape sequence.

A program that does not expect escape sequences would generally be using the default terminal I/O modes, in which the operating system's terminal driver conventionally echoes an escape character as ^[ (because on most keyboards you can type an escape character that way).

From your description, it sounds as if MyBayes does not expect escape sequences.

Rather than using arrow keys for command-line editing, you should be able to use the backspace or delete ( erase ) character which the terminal sends.

Answer 2

To fix this behaviour, installing rlwrap does the trick.
rlwrap will convert the escape characters to their corresponding actions and also provides a history. Sadly though no tab-completion for directories.

For linux execute MrBayes like this:

$ rlwrap mb

or for mpi version:

$ rlwrap mpirun -np x mb

where x is number of processors/threads used.