why is readline used?

[alok]

using rustyline would allow for integrating fuzzy search as in kkawakam/rustyline#323

i think fuzzy search/completion should be a primitive in text UIs, so i'm evangelizing rn

[dankamongmen]

I'm willing to take a look at it -- and thanks for the suggestion! -- but I'm initially disinclined, since rust stuff tends to be so poorly packaged in distributions. I'm also unsure how well C calling into Rust works, though I've heard it's pretty smooth. The calls into Readline are hardly performance-sensitive, so any overhead from cross-language calls ought not be a problem.

Before I can consider doing this, I'll need to verify that rustyline is available, in a form that can be linked from C programs, in at least the distributions in which notcurses is currently shipped. That would include Debian and derivatives thereof, Fedora and derivatives thereof, Alpine, Gentoo, Arch, and FreeBSD/DragonFly BSD. If you can provide links, that'll definitely accelerate the process. If it's not packaged, I hope you understand that it's not possible.

[dankamongmen]

https://packages.debian.org/unstable/librust-rustyline-dev
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/rust-rustyline

that's debian and fedora, but i didn't see arch/alpine (didn't look long, though). pretty promising.

[dankamongmen]

so @alok one thing to consider is that libreadline needs some special support from Notcurses directmode in order to work properly. it's possible that rustyline doesn't, and can be used with directmode just fine by itself. have you tried this?

i didn't want to even embed readline support into notcurses, but otherwise you couldn't properly set it up.

[alok]

I haven't, and likely won't be able to for a long time if ever =(. But I'll keep that in mind in case I ever do.

[dankamongmen]

I haven't, and likely won't be able to for a long time if ever =(. But I'll keep that in mind in case I ever do.

understood. i'm going to close this bug up as NOTFIX, and if anyone wants to use rustyline and runs into problems, i encourage them to reopen this or start a new one. for now, i'm assuming rustyline will work just fine with Notcurses. thanks for bringing it to my attention!