tclreadline -- gnu readline for tcl

Copyright (c) 1998 - 2014, Johannes Zellner johannes@zellner.org This software is copyright under the BSD license.

tclreadline

Introduction

This directory contains the sources and documentation for tclreadline, which builds a connection between tcl and the gnu readline.

Documentation

The tclreadline.n nroff man page in this release contains the reference manual entries for tclreadline. If you only want to use tclreadline as a tool for interactive script development, you don't have to read this manual page at all. Simply change your .tclshrc according to the section later in this file.

Compiling and installing tclreadline

This release will probably only build under UNIX (Linux).

Before trying to compile tclreadline you should do the following things:

1. Make sure you have tcl 8.0 or higher. tclreadline relies on a proper tcl installation: It uses the tclConfig.sh file, which should reside somewhere in /usr/local/lib/ or /usr/local/lib/tcl8.0/...

2. Make sure you have gnu readline 2.2 or higher. tclreadline uses the gnu readline callback handler, which wasn't implemented in early releases.

3. The usual ./configure; make; make install sequence should do the rest.

4. Optionally (or additionally) you can build the executables tclshrl and / or wishrl which are a readline enhanced replacement for tclsh and wish. To compile these executable you should type

    ./configure --enable-tclshrl --enable-wishrl
   

   (or one of these if you want just tclshrl or wishrl). NOTE that these executables need an installed version of tclreadline because they need some script files to run so you can't test tclshrl/wishrl before installing the tclreadline scripts.

   Building statically linked executables is DISCOURAGED but necessary on systems which don't support shared libs.

Using tclreadline for interactive tcl scripting.

copy the sample.tclshrc to $HOME/.tclshrc. If you use another interpreter like wish, you should copy the file sample.tclshrc to $HOME/.wishrc (or whatever the manual page of your interpreter says.) If you have installed tclreadline properly, you are just ready to start: start your favorite interpreter. The tclreadlineSetup.tcl script does the rest.