Readline is one of several possible "keyboard input handling frontends" that a program might use. A program might also use none (other than the usual stdio handling done by libc).
As mentioned, .inputrc
is used by readline, so it will only affect programs that use readline. Bash is such a program, so it will use .inputrc
indirectly, but it is not a file that you will source like files as .bashrc
, and the syntax is not related at all.
The .inputrc
file is only loaded (indirectly though the readline library) by the program at startup. From the documentation:
When a program which uses the Readline library starts up, the init file is read, and the key bindings are set.