Terminal editing was done in general on the Blit and follow-on systems.
That's primarily why the Research shells didn't do it.

But history (ha!) chose another path.

-rob


On Sun, Feb 20, 2022 at 10:20 AM Sven Mascheck <mascheck@in-ulm.de> wrote:

> On 19.02.2022 23:39, John Cowan wrote:
>
> On Sat, Feb 19, 2022 at 1:45 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> I undid all the macros for the v8 shell, with Steve's blessing, before
>> doing the key work on that shell. But no one outside cared about any of the
>> research Unixes after v7,
>>
>
> Lots of us would have loved to care about them and were sad that we
> couldn't until they were open sourced much later.
>
>
> 8th ed sh (about '84) brought quite a few changes and fixes. Just naming a
> few:
> - environment variable HISTORY, pointing to a writable file, providing a
> history mechanism by means of "=(1)"
> - type is replaced by whatis, which produces output that can be
> re-evaluated by the shell
> - functions can be exported, in the same ways like variables
>
> keyword history: I always imagined that the Bourne shell would have been
> in much wider use even nowadays, if only it had provided line editing and a
> history at some point. Why not? Even Kenneth Almquist released his
> SVR4-like reimplementation intentionally without history. All that might
> have been implemented more elegant directly in the terminal I/O instead of
> in every program? (that is, not in a MS-DOS-like way, where every program
> even needs its own pager).
>
> I still wonder if it would be possible to properly provide line editing
> and history in the terminal I/O in general.
>
> Sven
>