[racket-dev] Line editing in the default REPL

Eli Barzilay wrote on 12/02/2014 09:31 PM:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Leif Andersen <leif at leifandersen.net> wrote:
>> Just to clarify a bit, we were more thinking of extending the default
>> repl to have line editing features, rather then making xrepl the
>> default,
> If you're talking about implementing line editing yourself, then my
> personal reaction to that would be "wonderful", but doing it properly is
> something that is difficult and easy to underestimate....

I agree fully with Eli.

Also, separate from practical benefit of having basic `readline`-like 
line editing in pure Racket, you could go gratuitously coolness factor 
on this.  For example, I don't think I've seen a non-full-screen 
character-terminal REPL do syntax coloring, matching paren highlighting, 
and full up/down cursor navigation within a single REPL input.  That's 
labor-of-love coolness, and all who behold it will respect your name.

("http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-charterm/" would help with some 
primitives and device portability, but you'd still have to layer a lot 
of work atop that.  Offhand, the most nonobvious tricky part I can think 
of is not getting program confused about where text and your cursor are 
on the screen.  Different terminals will have different behavior when 
cursor is in the last column, or cursor is in the last row and column, 
or you're inserting/deleting characters or lines (which some terminals 
will support differently, and others not at all).  You also have to 
decide how you want to handle the user experience of some kind of Ctrl-L 
redraw, since terminal screens get corrupted often by text written by 
other processes, Ctrl-L also helps mitigate terminal quirks you don't 
yet handle, and terminal-savvy people will expect a Ctrl-L.  It's 
possible to make a self-healing character terminal display, on those 
terminals that permit reading screen addresses and that have sufficient 
idle bandwidth, but I haven't heard of anyone doing that yet, and 
everyone just has a Ctrl-L.)

Neil V.