bash vi mode converging with ksh

One of the great features of ksh (93 and sun's) is the option to invoke an external editor on the current command line, while preserving multi-line layout.

In vi-editing mode, the ESC-'v' keystroke invokes an external editor ${VISUAL:-${EDITOR:-vi}} on the current command line. Bash does this as well, but on exit, all newlines are replaced with semicolons, while ksh preserves them.

It's one of my minor nits with bash, but for me it's important. I like my 'one-liners' readable, even if they span half a screen... This is nice to have, as many of the script that I've written were prototyped on the command line.

Shortly after my original post I read the bash(1) man page and found me the 'lithist' shell option.

It works of sorts, but it's not the behaviour I'm familiar with in ksh.

• When scrolling back in history, ksh truncates long lines and lets you scroll horizontally, while bash will wrap them across multiple lines. Not bad, but counter-intuitive in vi-mode. Maybe there's another option to escape newlines.
  
  
• After invoking vi, and re-evaluating the command line, bash returns to edit-mode. Ksh returns to the default prompt.
  
  
• Bash specific shell options are set with 'shopt' in contrast to 'set -o ' for traditional longname options. I'm not sure why there's two methods for a similar feature, a good guess is that it prevents collisions with other shell options. It beats the csh method of storing options in shell variables.
  
  
• Minor nit: after completion, the shell prompt command counter ( ! in posix mode ) is not incremented until an extra newline is entered. The counter then jumps by two.