Things to Know About GNU Readline

> Ramey told me via email that Readline, far from being an original idea, was created to implement functionality prescribed by the POSIX specification, which in the late 1980s had just been created. This actually isn't true. The POSIX shell spec (1003 IIRC) was published in 1992. The headline library was in the first bash release; Brian might have written it before starting on bash. The inspiration was the TOPS-20 input JSYS (system call) mixed in with Emacs. How do…

Along the same lines, I find this little utility in standard linux repos to be amazing. Try it on ed: `rlwrap ed`. Package: rlwrap [...] Homepage: https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap Description-en: readline feature command line wrapper This package provides a small utility that uses the GNU readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any other command. Input history is remembered across invocations, separately for each command; history completion and search work as in bash and completion word…