Re: Reactive Keyboard

[schwartz@groucho.cs.psu.edu]

| If you want to get a copy, I believe its on export.lcs.mit.edu. My
| thought is that rk could replace readline and history as an interactive
| interface to rc...

Rk is a lot of fun.  If your terminal can do underlining, be sure to
turn that on in the rksetup; it looks much better.  (If you aren't
using a VAX, you'll need to fix a bug in rksetup where it assumes that
NULL == "" for some of the termcap strings.)

One problem, however,  with rk and related tools (atty, fep, etc) is
that they do completion incorrectly.  They can (and do) try and track
the current directory, but even in principle that is wrong, since the
shell might be executing on a different machine than the input editor.
I've been thinking about clean ways to allow the shell to do completion
and communicate with the editor; it seems like that would be the best
overall scheme.

One other problem with these and other pty related items is that they
all do pty handling in idiosyncratic ways.  Even worse, unless they can
run as root, they cannot change pty modes and ownership nor make
entries in e.g. /etc/utmp.  (Rk suffers that flaw.) The best fix for
that stuff is to rip out all the custom pty code, and drop in a nice
modular replacement, like Dan Bernstein's pty program.  It isn't
perfect, but its a good start.

| ( It might be hot in Pittsburgh, but at least it's humid.

Almost as nice as Philly, hey? :-)