RLFE(1)

okay so bestie, pull up a chair because we're talking about rlfe(1) from the General Commands Manual and honestly? it's giving genius 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

rlfe — the tool that "cooks" input lines for other programs using readline 🍳✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

rlfe [-l filename] [-a] [-n appname] [-hv] [command [arguments ...]]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like, rlfe lets you use history and line-editing in any text oriented tool. literally any of them. 💅

and the way this SLAPS is with third-party proprietary tools that cannot be distributed linked against readline — those ones that are just out here raw and uneditable? yeah, rlfe has them. 🔥

ngl it is not perfect but it works pretty well, and that's the energy we're bringing today. 💖

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -a — append to the logfile instead of overwriting it (because overwriting is the default, and yes that means your logfile gets clobbered unless you say otherwise 🙈).
• -l filename — log into file. that's it, that's the whole thing. 📝
• -n appname — set the readline application name. name your app, bestie. 🏷️
• -h — print the usage string. when you're lost, ask for directions. 🗺️
• -v — print version information. for when you gotta know what era of rlfe you're living in. ⭐

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• readline(3) — the icon that started it all 💜

💖 AUTHOR 💖

Per Bothner 🫶

💀 PROBLEMS/TODO 💀

okay so this is the "we're being honest with each other" section, and I respect it so much:

• When running mc -c under the Linux console, mc does not recognize mouse clicks, which mc does when not running under fep. 😭 mouse clicks just ghosting us.
• Pasting selected text containing tabs is like hitting the tab character, which invokes readline completion. We don't want this. And the author doesn't know if this is fixable without integrating fep into a terminal emulator. so like... it's a whole situation. 💀
• Echo suppression is a kludge, but it can only be avoided with better kernel support: we need a tty mode to disable "real" echoing, while still letting the inferior think its tty driver to doing echoing. Stevens's book claims SCR$ and BSD4.3+ have TIOCREMOTE. deep lore fr fr 📚
• The latest readline may have some hooks we can use to avoid having to back up the prompt. fingers crossed 🤞
• Desirable readline feature: when in cooked no-echo mode (e.g. password), echo characters are they are types with '*', but remove them when done. 👀
• A synchronous output while we're editing an input line should be inserted in the output view.PPbefore* the input line, so that the lines being edited (with the prompt) float at the end of the input. 🌊
• A "page mode" option to emulate more/less behavior: at each page of output, pause for a user command. This required parsing the output to keep track of line lengths. It also requires remembering the output, if we want an option to scroll back, which suggests that this should be integrated with a terminal emulator like xterm. 🖥️✨

not me reading a TODO list like it's a group chat. anyway, every one of these is real and documented, no cap.

and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this was RLFE(1) from the General Commands Manual — the one and only, the original, the main character of tty line editing. mwah 💋 stay slaying out there 🌈🦋