brianjhanfox

He slept in his office, and had ever since his house caught on fire, some years before I met him. I met him in 1984. When he moved his office to a rebuilt floor at tech square, he had a wall dividing the office into two halves. One half was his sleeping space, and the other, which was accessible from the hallway, was his working space.

"cut buffer" is actually "kill ring"

C-u only does that by default so that readline wouldn't confuse *nix users.

Interestingly enough, neither of these libraries are as objectively as good as readline. For example, they do not implement a true kill ring. They aren't macro programmable. I find it almost amusing that the authors were too lazy to actually reimplement all of the extremely well documented behavior in libreadline and libhistory.

And I trust Gumby's memory almost to a fault :-) I had already written a version of Emacs for the Apple ][ and Apple //e called Amacs in 1983 or so. I loved Emacs and Zmacs, and wanted to build software that had that clarity of architecture. So I knew I wanted readline to have as much of the feature set of a genuine editor as made sense.

I think Gumby was instrumental in talking to me about making a reasonable API for the completion part of readline. But I wrote a lot of code in the late 80s. And I wanted to use command line editing and completion in GDB, because we didn't have it. And I thought that was idiotic.

I knew I was going to write readline, and I knew I was going to write it as a library. I wrote the vast majority of it on a weekend after I had a working shell. POSIX was mostly me telling David Korn that just because he had created a shitty user interface feature, we shouldn't be required to make that part of the specification.