keyboard history editing

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <9104011503.AA01057@?lri.uwo.ca>, steckner at lri.uwo.ca (Michael Steckner) writes:
|> Is there some sort of shell that has been developed that will allow
|> me to use a cursor pad to scroll through my previous commands and
|> allow me to edit them in a convienient fashion as opposed to the
|> !n, ^^ editing options often used? Such cursor based techniques are
|> available on VAX/VMS and some public domain IBM PC software, for those
|> who may be unaware of what I am talking about.

  There are several such shells.  Bruce Varney has already mentioned bash,
which is a freely redistributable (under the GPL) shell based on the bourne
shell.

  There is also the korn shell, which is sold by AT&T and is also based on the
bourne shell.  It's similar to bash (or, more accurately, bash is similar to
ksh, since I believe ksh came first), but you have to pay AT&T to get it.

  There's also tcsh, which is based on the C-shell (csh) rather than on the
bourne shell.  Tcsh is distributed as a set of patches to convert the 4.3BSD
csh sources to tcsh, so you need to have 4.3BSD sources (and therefore a
4.3BSD source license) before you can build it.  However, it's possible to get
tcsh binaries for lots of different machines, so even if you can't build the
program, you can still run it on your machine.

  Posted to alt.sources, and archived at alt.sources archive sites, we have:

    * "zsh", a "ksh/tcsh-like shell"

    * a public-domain version of ksh

    * "clam", a "tcsh-like shell for Unix/Minix/Coherent"

  In comp.sources.unix, there's a shell called "ash" with a command-line
editor called "atty" that goes along with it and allows scrolling of the type
you are looking for.

  There are probably others that I haven't mentioned, but I think this is
enough.  The short answer to your question is, "Yes."  There are lots of
options from which you can choose.  To some extent, what you can use depends
on what type of system you have, but since you haven't told us that, I can't
say anything more in that direction....

-- 
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