Using Axiom with vi keystrokes

Maple’s command line interface honors vi keystrokes so I thought I should have those in Axiom too. Here’s a short recipe for that:

First of all, put the following line in your $HOME/.inputrcfile:

set editing-mode vi

This will tell the readline library to use vi-style editing by default.

After this, you will have to install rlwrap if you don’t have it on your system.

Now invoke Axiom with the following:

rlwrap -c -f /usr/local/axiom/mnt/fedora5/lib/command.list axiom -noclef

Note that you may have to replace the argument to the -f option with the location of command.list on your system (this will give you Axiom-specific completions).

That’s all!