Readline in emacs

Readline in emacs

[Jason Nielsen]

Hi all,

I have a console based application that has readline support for tab 
completion.  I'd like to run it within emacs via comint mode but don't 
want to give up tab completion and would rather not spend hours writing 
elisp to get a similar functionality.  Any help/direction/pointers would 
be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jason

Re: Readline in emacs

[Peter Jones]

Jason Nielsen <jdn@cs.sfu.ca> writes:
> I have a console based application that has readline support for tab
> completion.  I'd like to run it within emacs via comint mode but don't
> want to give up tab completion and would rather not spend hours
> writing elisp to get a similar functionality.  Any
> help/direction/pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Not sure if this helps, but ...

If you start a terminal emulator in Emacs (M-x term) you can run your
application directly (instead of a shell), and switch between line
mode and char mode.

In char mode (the default term mode), all keys work as expected,
including tab, because they are sent directly to the console
application.  In line mode, however, term mode will see the keys
first, and only sends what you type after pressing RET.

Also, term mode uses comint mode, so maybe you could look at how char
mode in term mode works when writing a comint wrapper for your console
application.

-- 
Peter Jones, pmade inc.
http://pmade.com