Bash readline blink-matching-paren not blinking matching parentheses

Question

Bash readline has a setting called blink-matching-paren that is not working for me. If I type an open parenthesis on the command line, then some text, then a close parenthesis I don't get any blinking. Parentheses matching does work for me in vim and emacs -nw.

Here are the settings and versions, etc.:

$ bind -v | grep blink-matching-paren
set blink-matching-paren on
$ set -o | grep -E '\<(emacs|vi)\>'
emacs           on
vi              off

Various combinations of:

• Bash 4.0.33(1)-release
• Bash 4.1.9(2)-release
• Bash 3.2.51(24)-release
• mintty 0.9.2
• PuTTY 0.60 (with and without "Enable Blinking Text")
• xterm 243
• gnome-terminal 2.28.1
• TERM=xterm
• TERM=xterm-256color

What do I need to do to make parentheses matching work in Bash on the command line?

Answer 1

Try setting that in .inputrc, like:

$ cat ~/.inputrc
set blink-matching-paren on

Somehow this setting does not work for me when set interactively, but works fine that way.