$Id: README,v 1.18 2000/05/11 20:07:21 vons Exp $ DESCRIPTION This is version 1.3.3 of 'vrl', a library that allows an application to read a line from the terminal, giving the user additional editing capabilities like cursor movement, filename completion and command history. It is a kind of a lightweight version of the GNU readline library, having the necessary functions but smaller and faster (like Rick Salz' editline library). It has been developed to work with the rc-shell, but may be useful for other things as well. Compared to editline, vrl lacks a number of editing cmds (the ones I never use :-), but adds the following: - the cmdline will scroll if it is longer than the screen is wide. - automatically lists all possible completions when given prefix is ambiguous. - history mgmnt has a no-dups mode (see manpage). - A .vrlrc allows the user to configure the auto-complete, history mgmnt, ... behavior. - knows about terminal's home/end/insert/delete keys For more information, see the vrl(1) manpage. Check out http://vons.free.fr/tools/index.html for the latest version. COPYRIGHT Vrl is copyright (C)1996-2000 by Gert-Jan Vons . You can re-use this code if you want, as long as you give me credit. BUILDING INSTRUCTIONS Vrl has been written using ANSI-C, but will compile with older non-ANSI compilers as well. Vrl should work fine on most UNIX systems, it is regularly tested on current FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, and OpenBSD releases. Compilation is simple: run the configure script and type make. Gert-Jan E-MAIL vons at netcourrier dot com DEBUGGING Compiling with -DDEBUG will include assert()'s, verbose msgs, and some additional debugging code. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- KNOWN PROBLEMS - UnixWare 2.1.2 Terminal/xterm: first line of output of a started program seems to miss characters (i.e. the first line of an 'ls' is not ok). This is caused by a bug in their xterm which eats all space characters after receiving the keypad disable code, up to and including the first non-space. It works ok with TERM=xterm (the UnixWare xterm termcap entry no longer has the ks/ke entries), but fails with TERM=vt100 or when using an rlogin to another system (where xterm does have ks/ke). - QNX4's pterm: the termcap file lacks the entries for the End-key. Add :@7=\E[Y: to "qansi" and :@7=\0377\0250 to "qnx" for this to work. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CURRENT VERSION: 1.3.3 1.3.3 2000/05/11 - added support for QNX4 (fixes from sam at cogent dot ca): * "ar" does not take any options * termcap.h doesn't declare the BC/PC/... variables. * pterm termcap entries lack description of END key. 1.3.2 1999/12/16 - bugfix: vrl started looping when write() returned EIO (happens when tty disappears unexpectedly) 1.3.1 1998/10/27 - bugfix: vrl dumped core when $HOME was not set on startup 1.3 1998/10/20 - bugfix: a crashing pthread application under FreeBSD 2.2.6 leaves the tty in non-blocking mode, resulting in EAGAIN on a read() in vrl, which caused the shell to die. Vrl now forces the tty to back to blocking I/O if needed. - bugfix: although doc says 1024 bytes should do for a termcap buffer, sometimes more is needed. Buffer size doubled. - bugfix: ospeed could overflow for high tty speeds. - added rltest.c to distrib. - Improved comments. 1.2 1998/07/20 - changed library name from readline.a to libvrl.a 1.1 1998/02/15 - fixed (from ): RANLIB was not correctly defined in Makefile. - fixed/changed (from ): ^D is now bound to the delete-char function, instead of acting like a return. A ^D on an empty line indicates EOF, provided that the last char typed just before was not a ^D. - fixed: vrl leaked memory during a filename completion that didn't match anything. - fixed: manpage mentioned tilde-expansion, but that isn't implemented. - added: ESC-? lists possible matches (like ESC-ESC) - added: ESC-* now puts _all_ matches on the cmdline - changed: "*.c[TAB]" will no longer match "config.cache", i.e. if the (last part of) the expression already contains a wildcard, it should match the whole filename and not just be a prefix of it. - changed: timeout for multi-byte keys/commands increased from 0.5 to 1 second. 1.0 1998/01/04 - changed: the backspace key was dead on ttys where it generated the code '\177' (e.g. vt220). Was the consequence of having '\177' bound to the delete-char function and thus not allowing it to be redefined, causing the tty's backspace key to remain un-bound. Removed this association, delete-char function will be bound to tty's DEL key (and ^D). However, some termcap entries lack the DEL key entry. If it is missing, and \177 is not generated by another key, assume there is a DEL key after all, and that it generates '\177'. - configure: added lookup of lint program - configure: also look at curses lib for termcap stuff - configure: termcap var test now accesses variables, only linking using tgoto() was not enough. 0.92 1997/06/26 - bugfix: MIN()/MAX() macros conflicted with system includes. Removed them, they were no longer used anyway. - updated configure.in for autoconf 2.12. - removed the BROKEN_TIOCGWINSZ test from configure.in, simply include the TIOCGWINSZ if it exists on the system. If it doesn't work at runtime, we'll deal with it then. - EINVAL from TIOCGWINSZ is now ignored. It happens all the time on a UnixWare console, where EINVAL means that the ioctl() is not supported by the tty driver (it does work in a Terminal/xterm window however). - change: VWERASE, VREPRINT, and VLNEXT are not available on all Unix systems (like SCO OpenServer, ...), they are now only included if they exist. - UnixWare cc doesn't like "cc -c foo.c -o foo.o"; removed all the "-o foo.o" from the makefile, hoping it doesn't break on other systems. 0.91 1996/10/02 - bugfix: rc specifies a NULL-ptr when it doesn't want a prompt, which caused a core-dump. 0.9 1996/10/02 - bugfix: filename completion didn't work on dead symlinks (was bug in wildexp()). 0.8 1996/09/01 - Removed msg about setting tty size under solaris. Problem only occurs when running Solaris 1.x binaries under Solaris 2.5, a native Solaris 2.5 binary will fix the problem (looks like a solaris bug though...) - Fixed problem when the screen was incorrectly updated when moving from a long to a short line in the cmd history. - integrated update of wildexp(), corrects bug where a symlink to a directory was treated as a file by the completion code, i.e. a space was added to it instead of a DIRSEP. 0.7 1996/08/07 - fix: Under Solaris 2.5, the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl() apparently fails if the tty width/height are not correctly set with stty ?!?!? Anyway, vrl didn't handle this correctly, causing the shell to hang. - fix: version display looked bad when it overwrote a long line/prompt, added a clr2eol() - replaced glob() with wildexp() 0.6 1996/05/22 - use STDOUT_FILENO for tty writes - fix: error msgs no longer mess up the cmdline - fix: errors when parsing .vrlrc were detected, but the msgs were never generated - fix: ESC-ESC and ESC-v were missing from manpage 0.5 1996/05/20 - fix: cursor-key type-ahead failed on vt100 - fix: configure didn't test for memmove() - ESC-v will display version - lint fixes 0.4 1996/05/17 - filename completion failed when curdir had only one file. - after completion, cursor position was not optimal if there already was a space after the expression. - some error msgs lacked the trailing \n. - added ^T (transpose chars). - added ^O (re-read the $HOME/.vrlrc file). - lot of improvements to screen update, prompt now stays in place. - ospeed takes Bxxx, not the actual value. - sigwinch was broken (include file was missing) - stayed up too late, the pushback in sym.c requires a lifo, not a fifo. - added ansicursorkeys option to enable type-ahead of cursor keys on some terminals (xterm, vt100, ...). - completed manpage 0.3 1996/05/13 - tested on Sun, fixed number of lint-style warnings all over the place - added CC=@CC@ and CFLAGS=@CFLAGS@ to Makefile.in. latter defaults to -O if not set in env. - cleaned up history search stuff - configure tested for strerror(), but util.c didn't contain it - added test for strstr() to configure, and the code to util.c 0.2 1996/05/12 - added code behind rl_reset_terminal(). - SIGWINCH is now handled (and passed to the application just before readline() returns). - fixed some problems in the filename completion. - started work on manpage. - When completing or using word-delete, the word no longer ends at the cursor. - various other fixes. 0.1 1996/05/10 - Initial revision. It works, doesn't crash, but the todo list is still quite long...