"Simon Marlow" writes:

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[SimpleLineEditor]

Hmm. I'm highly dubious that this can be done portably enough to be worthwhile. The only way to get information about the terminal is by consulting termcap or terminfo, otherwise you're just guessing.

I'm pretty sure that even termcap/terminfo does not contain the sort of information we need. There are just too many layers of environment to worry about.

I'm not aware of any reason why termcap/terminfo aren't complete enough - could you give an example? After all, these are the only mechanisms available to readline and terminal apps. If the termcap says that the down arrow key produces a certain string, then that's the string you see in the input, AFAIK. Why not just write a binding to curses? (actually, doesn't one already exist? I seem to recall that there was one in QForeign).

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Isn't this just a pile of bug reports waiting to happen? Or a neverending maintenance headache?

Yes, I expect so. But someone did have a plea that even some small editing functionality would be better than nothing. So in the spirit of "worse is better"...

Hmm, sometimes worse really is worse :-) Cheers, Simon