rustyline VS cargo-xtask

This latest release adds a Rustyline-based REPL and additional tools for using the filesystem as a relational database. The new init subcommand lets you declare the primary key by which a directory (and its subdirectories) are indexed, while ins and del now allow insertion and deletion of records while keeping related indices up to date. ls is helpful in the REPL, showing Ghee's view of the world.

That what gnu readline is good at, interpreter like interface. There is also this one https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline

In the process of implementing Marwood's web REPL, I ported rust's [Rustyline](https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline) readline library to an Xterm.js typescript addon called [xterm-readline](https://github.com/strtok/xterm-readline/).

There is rustyline, which is a readline implementation. It supports line editing in emacs or vi mode (selectable). I don't know if it can operate on two strings as input, but if your program takes input from a terminal, this could be what you are looking for.

Not sure if it will help in this case (docs always take effort to write and make good), but most crates have an examples directory in the root of their repo which can be helpful in the absence of guide-level docs https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline/tree/master/examples

https://crates.io/crates/rustyline - readline clone in Rust

https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline (literally, input a command)

Also based on popular demand, the REPL tool now uses a slightly enhanced version of rustyline for line editing and history.

it is also worth checking if library contains examples. this one does.

Maybe try reedline or rustyline and see if they meet your needs?

💡 Inspired by matklad/cargo-xtask and based on 🏃‍♂️ Write your Rust project scripts in task.rs from the Rust ecosystem.

Using a cargo-xtask task to generate them as a manual step (inlyne currently does this)

As someone else said just is good for that job, or you could implement an xtask helper for these things and setup a suitable development environment with that: https://github.com/matklad/cargo-xtask/

Well tools like cornucopia, prisma-rust-client, protoc-gen-tonic, they don't generate in build.rs, but instead provide either a cli to be called ahead of time, or provide a library that can be called by your own binary (which should generally follow the xtask pattern)

If I understand, this is a tool for when working on the project itself? Akin to a helper script? You could go the cargo install route as already pointed out but there is also the xtask convention.

For simple cli apps for internal use, such as cargo-xtasks, I prefer pico_args due to its fast compile times.

For developer-oriented stuff, there's tools like xshell and cargo-xtask. For operator tasks that need to run in a deployed environment, it's not usually a big lift to add CLI subcommands to your binary. It's certainly more boilerplate and inertia than doing stuff in a live REPL, though, and sometimes difficult to recommend for truly one-off situations.