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CLE 0.3

PURPOSE

Cle is a Command Line Editor. It provides the editing/history/completion of the GNU readline package to any line-oriented Unix command. For instance,

$ cle ftp foo.bar.org

adds editing/history/completion commands to the ftp command.

Since most modern shells allow you to define aliases, you can define a simple alias such as

$ alias ftp="cle \ftp" (bash or zsh syntax) or

$ alias ftp cle ftp (tcsh or csh syntax) to always uses cle with the ftp command.

BUILD

To build cle, run the following commands

$ configure; make; make install

configure accepts only one non-generic parameter: "--with-curses".

Using this parameter allows to build the readline library with curses instead of termcap. A list of the generic configure parameters can be found in the INSTALL file.

INITIALIZATION FILES

Since cle uses the readline package, it can be customized by the file "~/.inputrc". When cle is run it initializes the readline package and gives it the name of the application it controls. This can be used to define different bindings for different commands. An example is given below:

        $if ftp
        "\C-xl": "dir\C-m"
        $endif
        $if stk
        "\C-xl": "(system \"ls -ls\")\C-m"
        $endif
        $if ed
        "\C-xl": "!ls -l\C-m"
        $endif

See the file "etc/sample-inputrc" file for a more complete example. See also standard readline documentation package for details on the available "bindable" functions and on the format of this file.

When a cle'ed application leaves, the state of the history is saved in a file whose name is ~/.XXX-history, where XXX is the name of the application. The history size defaults to 100 lines but it can be changed by the --size option of cle. See cle(1) for more details.

PARENTHESIS FLASHING

The readline version compiled with cle uses parentheses flashing (i.e when you type a closing parenthesis, the corresponding opening parenthesis flashes). Rebind the closing parentheses is with "self-insert" to get rid of this feature. Example:

         $if ftp 
         ")": self-insert 
         "]": self-insert 
         "}": self-insert 
         $end

RELATED PACKAGES

ILE and FEP are two similar packages which also provide command line editing. These packages don't seem to be maintained anymore and their command line editing functions are less extensive than those provided by the readline package.

DISTRIBUTION

Cle is distributed under the terms of the GPL (see file COPYING for license terms) and is available from http://kaolin.unice.fr/Cle

AUTHOR

Erick Gallesio <eg@unice.fr>