2.2 Simple Init File

GNU poke is a spartan program that tries to be as simple as possible by default, without fancy displays. Therefore, before exploring poke you may want to configure it minimally. This section contains a few recommendations in that respect.

First we must say that poke reads a per-user configuration from the ~/.pokerc file. See pokerc.

We recommend new users to set the following options:

.set endian little
.set omode tree
.set oacutoff 5
.set pretty-print yes
.set pager yes

.set endian little will make poke to use little-endian by default when accessing IO spaces, such as files or memory buffers. See Big and Little Endians.

.set omode tree will make poke to format composite data structures, such as arrays and struct, in several lines in a nice tree-like format. By default the program will format these values in a single line (what we call the “plain” output mode) which can be difficult to read.

.set oacutoff 5 will make poke to output at most five elements in array values, followed by a dieresis ....

.set pretty-print yes will make poke to use pretty-printers when printing out values of struct types that have a pretty-printer defined for them. You can recognize pretty-printed values because, by convention, they are emitted between #< and > markers, like for example #<leb128:1234>. If you see a pretty-printed value and you need to look at its internal structure, you can disable pretty-printing using a .set pretty-print no dot-command at any time. See Pretty-printers.

.set pager yes will make poke to page the output of commands that emit output larger than the visible terminal. This of course only has an effect when running poke interactively.

These options are fully explained later in this manual. See set command.