Minix Editline

Introduction

This is a small line editing library. It can be linked into almost any program to provide command line editing and history functions. It is call compatible with the FSF readline library, but at a fraction of the size, and as a result fewer features.

The small size (<30k), lack of dependencies (no ncurses needed!), and the free license should make this library interesting to many embedded developers.

Editline has several optional build-time features that can be enabled by by supplying different options to the GNU configure script. See the output from configure --help for details. In the examples/ directory you can find some small code snippets used for testing.

API

TODO

Example

TODO

Origin & References

The editline library was created by Simmule Turner and Rich Salz back in in 1992. It is distributed under a "C News-like" license, similar to the BSD License. For details, see the file LICENSE.

This version of the editline library is forked from the Minix 3 tree. Other known versions, often based off of the original comp.sources.unix posting, are:

• Debian libeditline
• Heimdal
• Festival speech-tools
• Steve Tell's editline patches

The most intersting patches and bug fixes from each fork have been merged here. Outstanding issues are listed in the TODO file.

An explanation of the version numbering may be in order. I didn't know about the Debian version for quite some time, so I kept a different name for the package and a different versioning scheme. In June 2009, I decided to line up alongside Debian, with the intent of eventually merging the efforts. However, despite several attempts, the Debian maintainer has not responded to my emails.