php-cli VS rlwrap

While it is fun to parse argv by hand, I go straight for full-featured command-line parsing frameworks like cobra in go, clap in rust, click in python, php-cli in PHP.

Possibly more universal, but there are also tools like rlwrap [1] that adds readline support to programs that don't have it. From the docs apparently the readline library ships a similar tool ootb nowadays but I haven't tried that and just noticed now when I wanted to share the rlwrap link.

[1] https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap

Otherwise I use rlwrap, which is a general purpose readline wrapper: https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap It's pretty basic stuff, but makes basic line editing less painful, & adds history support.

Friends if you dont know: you can add readline support to LOTS of things, especially custom scripts and tools with a prompt by just calling the program with rlwrap.

> rlwrap is a 'readline wrapper', a small utility that uses the GNU Readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any command.

https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap

rlwrap for any interactive command will give it a history. You can even build a file to have tab completion. https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap

rlwrap is a 'readline wrapper', a small utility that uses the GNU Readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any command, something that tclsh, wish and sbcl don't provide.

This can be as easy as wrapping a simple stdin/stdout loop with rlwrap, all the way to using full featured TUI libraries like bubbletea (golang), textual (python) or imtui (c++).

You could always use rlwrap (installable via homebrew). You would launch R with rlwrap R in that case. However, I suspect there is something else missing, because it appears that the R repl usually includes readline support. Thus my questions about installation method and OS.

As you can see ,clj, behind the scenes, wraps a call to $bin_dir/clojure with the rlwrap tool. rlwrap provides a better command-line editing experience.

If read-line functionality is missing from languages that provide repls or command line interpreters, rlwrap has always served me well on linux. Many distros provide their own package too.