Coming from 'zsh' I got used to hit 'Ctrl-L' at any point to clear my screen. It might be a bad habit but I was having a hard time getting used to type 'clear' manually on my 'ksh' shells. This patch will allow you do hit ^L at any point in insert mode, it will clear the screen and keep your current line, you can return or continue editing from a cleared screen.
This patch is far from clean as it spawns tput(1) to avoid linking ksh to terminfo. I do not plan to submit this. A more elegant solution would be to allow bindings in 'vi' mode and allow external command calls from bindings.
OpenBSD's ksh is based on pdksh but unlike pdksh, it is still maintained. Because I got used to some new features and some interface improvements, I got frustrated with the default pdksh and started compiling OpenBSD's ksh on linux. Here is the patch:
Here are the quick and dirty instructions to install OpenBSD's ksh. Please try to use a CVS mirror from this page. I include strlcpy and strlcat in the patch, the make install will put ksh in /bin so backup/uninstall your current ksh if any.
$ wget http://tamentis.com/hacks/ksh/files/obsd_ksh_linux.patch $ CVSROOT=anoncvs@anoncvs.fr.openbsd.org:/cvs cvs co src/bin/ksh $ patch -d src/bin/ksh -p1 < obsd_ksh_linux.patch $ make -C src/bin/ksh $ sudo make -C src/bin/ksh install