enhance(1)

✨ NAME ✨

okay so bestie, meet enhance(1) from the General Commands Manual — a program that adds command-line editing to third party programs. that's literally the whole name vibe: it's the glow-up fairy for apps you didn't write and can't edit. 👑

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

run it like this, periodt:

enhance command [ argument ... ]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea: enhance gives you enhanced command-line editing facilities when you're using third party applications — and yes, the ones where you don't have any source code. it does this iconic thing by placing a pseudo-terminal between the application and the real terminal. then it uses the tecla command-line editing library to read input from the real terminal, and forwards each just completed input line to the application via the pseudo-terminal. all output from the application gets forwarded back unchanged to the real terminal. no cap, output stays untouched. ✨

whenever the application stops generating output for more than a tenth of a second, enhance treats the latest incomplete output line as the prompt, and redisplays any incompleted input line that you've typed after it. note that tiny delay — imperceptible to you — isn't necessary for correct operation of the program. it's just an optimization, designed to stop the input line from being redisplayed so often that it slows down output. lowkey clever. 🧚

also, the user-level command-line editing facilities provided by the Tecla library are documented in the tecla(7) man page. go read that for the full lore, iykyk. 📖

💀 DEFICIENCIES 💀

the one major problem that hasn't been solved yet is how to deal with applications that change whether typed input is echo'd by their controlling terminal.

for example, programs that ask for a password, such as ftp and telnet, temporarily tell their controlling terminal not to echo what the user types. since this request goes to the application side of the pseudo terminal, enhance has no way of knowing that this has happened, and continues to echo typed input to its controlling terminal while the user types their password. yeah. that's the vibe. 😭

also, before executing the host application, enhance initially sets the pseudo terminal to noecho mode, so that everything it sends to the program doesn't get redundantly echoed. but if a program that switches to noecho mode explicitly restores echoing afterwards — rather than restoring the terminal modes that were previously in force — then subsequently, every time you enter a new input line, a duplicate copy will be displayed on the next line. not the duplicate reveal we wanted, bestie. 🙈

🎀 FILES 🎀

• libtecla.a — the tecla library. literally the library.
• ~/.teclarc — the tecla personal customization file. your personal tecla customization file, slay.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

tecla(7), libtecla(3) — go check these out, bestie.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Martin Shepherd (mcs@astro.caltech.edu) — the icon who wrote this.

okay that's the whole page, bestie — enhance(1) from the General Commands Manual, footer just says enhance(1) and no extra date/version drama is listed, so we're keeping it cute and factual. mwah 💋✨