Multiline history

[leejarvis]

This would be non-trivial, but very cool, and would separate Pry from most other REPLs

See the comment here from kzar:

Do any of these IRB alternatives support multi-line history? I want to define a function, press up and have the whole function definition there instead of the last line of it -- how it works with Clojure's REPL.

[epitron]

Yep, this is one of the first things I suggested.

The simplest method would be to reimplement readline in curses. It wouldn't be too hard if we just implemented the default keymap... but readline has some kind of input-rc file where you can remap all the keys. Supporting all the weird readline features might get hairy.

Of course, we could just make the multiline input use the default readline keys, and give users who want to customize it the option of using the old readline method... once we have a config file. :)

[epitron]

Oh, I was also interested in working on a GUI frontend to Pry (using GTK), which should (in theory) make multiline readline simple. :)

[henrikh]

@epitron the question is if all those features are needed?
Having the ability to chose different front-ends would also be useful.

[epitron]

Well, I know a lot of people like to switch from standard readline keymap to vi-keymap. That feature alone would require most of the full input-rc parsing, I believe. :)

[banister]

This can kind of be implemented by joining the appropriate lines with "\n" and writing to the proper element in Readline::HISTORY see: https://github.com/janlelis/ripl-multi_line/blob/master/lib/ripl/multi_line.rb

[epitron]

So, readline will output multiple lines if you navigate to a history entry with \n's in it?

And I suppose, you'd then use the horizontal navigation keys (left, right, home, end, Alt-F/B) to edit to the previous lines?

[banister]

We've decided against this for the same reasons as IPython, we also have the edit command and edit --in which bring up actual editors with real multiline editing ;)