The last REPL I wrote used linenoise ( https://github.com/antirez/linenoise https://github.com/antirez/linenoise ) instead of readline, and it worked great for

The last REPL I wrote used linenoise ( https://github.com/antirez/linenoise https://github.com/antirez/linenoise ) instead of readline, and it worked great for us. You may need more of readline's features than we did, but it's worth a look.