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Interesting. It's frustrating when using programs with terrible line editing support because they've rolled their own. Hopefully this will work out well and the
by imurray 17y ago
Interesting. It's frustrating when using programs with terrible line editing support because they've rolled their own. Hopefully this will work out well and then be widely adopted by non-free and smaller projects for which readline has been rejected.
rlfe [1] is a wrapper that allows "any" program to use readline. At one point I hacked this so that I could get decent line editing in Matlab [2]. Matlab is particularly bad for inputs longer than a single line. The problem is that I then lost the native tab-completion support in Matlab and gave up.
[1] http://per.bothner.com/software/#rlfe http://per.bothner.com/software/#rlfe — Debian package available, and presumably for some other distros too.
[2] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~murray/code/rlfe_matlab/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~murray/code/rlfe_matlab/
- danh 17y agorlwrap does the same thing (and very well too, I might add).
- antirez 17y agoHello danh, actually rlwrap and readline are not doing at all the same thing, but are instead solving the same problem. In fact rlwrap uses readline itself in order to wrap another executable missing line editing support. Linenoise instead is intended to be an alternative to libreadline itself in order to provide built-in line editing capabilities.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoI believe danh is saying that rlwrap does the same thing as rlfe, another readline wrapper mentioned in the post above, not that linenoise is just a wrapper.
- eru 17y agoYes. On the other hand readline has brought more than one program into the realm of the GPL, so they certainly achieved some of their political goals.