[clbuild-devel] RfC: SBCL with rlwrap and sb-aclrepl

[David Lichteblau]

Hi there,

following up on a clbuild-devel thread from last year.

Quoting David Lichteblau (david at lichteblau.com):
> Perhaps it would be nice to enable linedit in "clbuild prepl" by
> default?  (Note that "clbuild prepl" also works on other Lisps, in
> particular Clozure.  We should see to it that the linedit feature is
> either supported by those Lisps, or enabled only if running on SBCL).

code from linedit is now available as a part of Hemlock's TTY backend.

If you run the following steps:
  clbuild install hemlock
  clbuild dumpcore hemlock.tty  # optional, improves startup speed
  clbuild prepl

you get a REPL with command line editing.

Improvements over upstream linedit include:
  - (better) support for multi-line editing
  - incremental search through history
  - persistent history
  - integrated with hemlock code

At the moment, possible disadvantages include:
  - integrated with hemlock code :-)
  - undo not optimal yet
  - lack of support for dumb terminals

Planned future improvements include syntax highlighting as in the real
TTY hackend, and more hemlock integration.

(Tested only on SBCL/Linux at the moment, but in principle as portable as
tty Hemlock is.)


d.