This file lists major changes which accompany each new release. Version 1.6.3: This release corrects some problems in the build process, including one that was preventing libtecla from being compiled on Mac OS X. Version 1.6.2: This release updates the configuration script to ensure that the enhance utility program is compiled correctly on systems that have system V psuedo-terminal allocation but not system V streams. There are no new features. Version 1.6.1: This is primarily a minor bug-fix release. One added feature is the ability to call gl_normal_io() from callbacks registered by gl_watch_fd() and gl_inactivity_timeout(). This allows these callbacks to cleanly suspend line editing before either reading from the terminal, or writing to the terminal; and then subsequently causes the input line to be automatically redisplayed, and line-editing to be resumed by gl_get_line(), as soon as the callback returns. Another minor change is that if the terminal type specified in the TERM environment variable is set to "dumb", gl_get_line() now treats the terminal as though it were a non-interactive stream, rather than treating it as a VT100-compatible terminal. This means that it doesn't either prompt for input, or perform any command-line editing, even when it really is interacting with a terminal. This is aimed at the rare situation where a third-pary program that connects to libtecla through an embedded pseudo-terminal, needs to be forced to behave as though it weren't talking to a terminal, in order that it be useable in non-interactive scripts. Note that in the previous release, the optional configuration function, gl_tty_signals(), was incorrectly swapping the suspend and terminal signal handlers before installing them. A configuration problem that prevented select() from being used under MacOS X, has been fixed. Although not documented in the man page, it was meant to be possible to take the input line that one call to gl_get_line() returned, and ask the next call to gl_get_line() to present it back to the user for re-editing, simply by passing the pointer returned by one call to gl_get_line() as the start_line argument of the next call to gl_get_line(). This feature unfortunately stopped working in 1.6.0, so this release restores it, and officially documents it in the man page documentation of gl_get_line(). In the previous version of the library, calling gl_terminal_size() on a system without SIGWINCH support, would crash the application. This has been fixed. Libtecla now apparently compiles cleanly under IRIX. Version 1.6.0: This release is primarily a bug-fix release. However there are also four new functions, so the minor version number has been incremented to reflect this. Two of the new functions are gl_automatic_history() and gl_append_history(). The former of these functions allows the application to tell gl_get_line() not to automatically archive entered lines in the history list. The second of these functions allows the application to explicitly append a line to the history list. Thus together, these two functions allow the calling application to take over control of what is placed in the history list. The third new function is gl_query_char(), which prompts the user for a single character reply, which the user can then type without having to hit return to enter it. Unless echoing is disabled, the character that is entered is then displayed after the prompt, and a newline is started. Finally, the 4th new function is gl_read_char(), which also reads a single character from the user, but doesn't prompt the user, write anything to the terminal, or disturb any partially entered input line. It is thus safe to call this function not only from between calls to gl_get_line(), but also from application callback functions, even if gl_normal_io() hasn't been called. When using the history-search-backwards or history-search-forwards actions, if the search prefix that the user typed, contains any of the *,? or [ globbing characters, it is now treated as a glob pattern to be matched against historical lines, instead of a simple prefix. I have added a --without-file-system option to the configure script. This is intended for use in embedded systems that either don't have filesystems, or where the file-system code in libtecla is seen as unwanted bloat. See the INSTALL document for details. Similarly, I also added a --without-file-actions option to the configure script. This allows the application author/installer to prevent users of gl_get_line() from accessing the filesystem with the builtin actions of gl_get_line(). It does this by removing a number of action functions, such as expand-filename, and list-glob, and by changing the default behavior of other actions, such as complete-word and list-or-eof, to show no completions. Now to the bugs that have been fixed. Version 1.5.0 had a lot of big internal changes, so there are a number of bugs that needed to be fixed. There was a bug which caused a crash if gl_load_history() was called multiple times. There was another bug which caused a prompt not to be displayed on the next line after switching from reading input from a file to reading from the terminal. Also, in tecla configuration files, backslash escaped characters within key-binding key-sequences weren't being escaped. Thus ^\\ got interpretted as a control-\ followed by a \ character instead of as a control-\. There was a bug in the history recall mechanism which caused the search prefix to be forgotten in certain complicated usage scenarios. There was a minor memory leak in the gl_configure_getline() function. Finally, if gl_get_line() was aborted by a signal, or any other abnormal event, the value of errno which originally indicated what had happened, got zeroed by the code that restored the terminal to a usable state. Thus the application couldn't figure out what had caused the error, apart from by looking at gl_return_status(). All of these bugs have been fixed. In the Makefile, there were a number of places where install-sh was invoked without a path prefix. This has now been remedied. A fully functional workaround for a bug in Solaris' terminal I/O code has also been implemented. This bug, which only manifested itself in libtecla's uncommonly used non-blocking server I/O mode, caused characters entered while in normal I/O mode, between calls to gl_get_line() to be invisible to the next call to gl_get_line(), until the user typed at least one more key after raw terminal mode was restored. The Gnu autoconf config.guess and config.sub scripts have been updated to their latest versions. Apparently the old versions that I was previously using were too old to know about certain BSD ports. Version 1.5.0: This release includes several major new features for those using gl_get_line(), shared library support in Darwin, better cross compilation support, and various minor bug fixes. The biggest new feature is the option of a non-blocking I/O mode, in which gl_get_line() can safely be called from an application's external event-loop to incrementally read input lines from the user. This feature is documented in the gl_io_mode(3) man page. In addition, there is now support for the definition of additional word-completion action functions, which can then be bound to different keys. See the documentation of the gl_completion_action() function in the gl_get_line(3) man page. Externally defined action functions can also be defined, although presently they don't have write access to the input line, so they are restricted to operations that display information text to the terminal, or modify the environment of the calling application in some way. See the documentation of the gl_register_action() function in the gl_get_line(3) man page. Some of the non-blocking I/O support functions can also be used for improved signal handling in the normal blocking mode. In particular, the gl_list_signals() and gl_catch_blocked() functions make it easier to write reliable signal handling around gl_get_line(). The new "RELIABLE SIGNAL HANDLING" section of the gl_get_line(3) man page is intended as an introduction to this subject. Programs can now clear the terminal between calls to gl_get_line(), by calling the new gl_erase_terminal() function. The gl_display_text() function, now used in the demos to display introductory banners, is provided for formatting text according to the width of the terminal. It is now possible to install inactivity timeout callbacks in gl_get_line(), using the new gl_inactivity_timeout() function. The new gl_set_term_size() function allows the application to explicitly set the terminal size, for cases, such as when one is using a terminal at the end of a serial lineq, where the terminal driver doesn't send the process a SIGWINCH when the terminal size changes. The new gl_bind_keyseq() function provides a convenient alternative to gl_configure_getline(), for binding or unbinding one key-sequence at a time. gl_get_line()s signal handling, file-descriptor event-handling, inactivity-timeout handling and server-mode non-blocking I/O features now not only work when input is coming from a terminal, but now also work when input is coming from non-interactive streams, such as files and pipes. The history implementation has been re-written to make it more efficient and easier to modify. The biggest user-level change is that when recalling history lines using a search prefix, the same line is no longer returned more than once in a row. Previously this duplicate elimination only worked when one was recalling a line without specifying a search prefix, and this was naively performed by preventing neighboring duplicates from existing in the history list, rather than by skipping duplicates at search time. In previous versions of the library, when gl_get_line() and its associated public functions detected invalid arguments, or couldn't allocate memory, etc, error messages were written to stderr. This isn't appropriate for library functions, so instead of writing such messages to stderr, these messages are now recorded in buffers within the affected GetLine object. The latest error message can then subsequently be queried by calling gl_error_message(). The use of errno has also been expanded, and a new function called gl_return_status() has been provided to expand on the cause of the last return from gl_get_line(). User level usage and configuration information has now been split out of the gl_get_line(3) man page into a separate tecla(7) man page. The enhance(3) man page has also been renamed to enhance(1). When expanding "~/", gl_get_line() now checks for, and returns the value of the HOME environment variable, if it exists, in preference to looking up the directory of the current user in the password file. When the terminal was resized to a narrower width, previous versions of gl_get_line() would redraw the line higher up the terminal. This bug has been fixed. A bug in history recall has also been fixed, in which an error message was being generated if one attempted to recall a line while the cursor was at the end of the longest possible input line. A more serious bug, in which callbacks registered by gl_watch_fd() weren't being called for write-events, has also been fixed. Finally, a few minor fixes have been made to improve support under QNX and Mac OS X. Beware that in this release, much of the underlying code has undergone some radical re-work, so although backwards compatibility of all documented features has been preserved, there may be some lingering bugs that could break existing programs. So, if you plan to use this version in production code, please test it as far as possible within your application before releasing it to your clients, and as always, please report any unexpected behavior. Version 1.4.1: This is a maintenance release. It includes minor changes to support Mac OS X (Darwin), the QNX real-time operating system, and Cygwin under Windows. It also fixes an oversight that was preventing the tab key from inserting tab characters when users unbound the complete-word action from it. Version 1.4.0: The contents of the history list can now be saved and restored with the new gl_save_history() and gl_load_history() functions. Event handlers can now be registered to watch for and respond to I/O on arbitrary file descriptors while gl_get_line() is waiting for terminal input from the user. See the gl_get_line(3) man page for details on gl_watch_fd(). As an optional alternative to getting configuration information only from ~/.teclarc, the new gl_configure_getline() function allows configuration commands to be taken from any of, a string, a specified application-specific file, and/or a specified user-specific file. See the gl_get_line(3) man page for details. The version number of the library can now be queried using the libtecla_version() function. See the libtecla(3) man page. The new gl_group_history() function allows applications to group different types of input line in the history buffer, and arrange for only members of the appropriate group to be recalled on a given call to gl_get_line(). See the gl_get_line(3) man page. The new gl_show_history() function displays the current history list to a given stdio output stream. See the gl_get_line(3) man page. new_GetLine() now allows you to specify a history buffer size of zero, thus requesting that no history buffer be allocated. You can subsequently resize or delete the history buffer at any time, by calling gl_resize_history(), limit the number of lines that are allowed in the buffer by calling gl_limit_history(), clear either all history lines from the history list, or just the history lines that are associated with the current history group, by calling gl_clear_history, and toggle the history mechanism on and off by calling gl_toggle_history(). The new gl_terminal_size() function can be used to query the current terminal size. It can also be used to supply a default terminal size on systems where no mechanism is available for looking up the size. The contents and configuration of the history list can now be obtained by the calling application, by calling the new gl_lookup_history(), gl_state_of_history(), gl_range_of_history() and gl_size_of_history() functions. See the gl_get_line(3) man page. Echoing of the input line as it is typed, can now be turned on and off via the new gl_echo_mode() function. While echoing is disabled, newly entered input lines are omitted from the history list. See the gl_get_line(3) man page. While the default remains to display the prompt string literally, the new gl_prompt_style() function can be used to enable text attribute formatting directives in prompt strings, such as underlining, bold font, and highlighting directives. Signal handling in gl_get_line() is now customizable. The default signal handling behavior remains essentially the same, except that the SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN and SIGTTOU are now forwarded to the corresponding signal handler of the calling program, instead of causing a SIGSTOP to be sent to the application. It is now possible to remove signals from the list that are trapped by gl_get_line(), as well as add new signals to this list. The signal and terminal environments in which the signal handler of the calling program is invoked, and what gl_get_line() does after the signal handler returns, is now customizable on a per signal basis. You can now also query the last signal that was caught by gl_get_line(). This is useful when gl_get_line() aborts with errno=EINTR, and you need to know which signal caused it to abort. Key-sequences bound to action functions can now start with printable characters. Previously only keysequences starting with control or meta characters were permitted. gl_get_line() is now 8-bit clean. If the calling program has correctly called setlocale(LC_CTYPE,""), then the user can select an alternate locale by setting the standard LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL, or LANG environment variables, and international characters can then be entered directly, either by using a non-US keyboard, or by using a compose key on a standard US keyboard. Note that in locales in which meta characters become printable, meta characters no longer match M-c bindings, which then have to be entered using their escape-c equivalents. Fortunately most modern terminal emulators either output the escape-c version by default when the meta key is used, or can be configured to do so (see the gl_get_line(3) man page), so in most cases you can continue to use the meta key. Completion callback functions can now tell gl_get_line() to return the input line immediately after a successful tab completion, simply by setting the last character of the optional continuation suffix to a newline character (ie. in the call to cpl_add_completion()). It is now safe to create and use multiple GetLine objects, albeit still only from a single thread. In conjunction with the new gl_configure_getline() function, this optionally allows multiple GetLine objects with different bindings to be used to implement different input modes. The edit-mode configuration command now accepts the argument, none. This tells gl_get_line() to revert to using just the native line editing facilities provided by the terminal driver. This could be used if the termcap or terminfo entry of the host terminal were badly corrupted. Application callback functions invoked by gl_get_line() can now change the displayed prompt using the gl_replace_prompt() function. Their is now an optional program distributed with the library. This is a beta release of a program which adds tecla command-line editing to virtually any third party application without the application needing to be linked to the library. See the enhance(3) man page for further details. Although built and installed by default, the INSTALL document explains how to prevent this. The INSTALL document now explains how you can stop the demo programs from being built and installed. NetBSD/termcap fixes. Mike MacFaden reported two problems that he saw when compiling libtecla under NetBSD. Both cases were related to the use of termcap. Most systems use terminfo, so this problem has gone unnoticed until now, and won't have affected the grand majority of users. The configure script had a bug which prevented the check for CPP working properly, and getline.c wouldn't compile due to an undeclared variable when USE_TERMCAP was defined. Both problems have now been fixed. Note that if you successfully compiled version 1.3.3, this problem didn't affect you. An unfortunate and undocumented binding of the key-sequence M-O was shadowing the arrow-key bindings on systems that use ^[OA etc. I have removed this binding (the documented lower case M-o binding remains bound). Under the KDE konsole terminal this was causing the arrow keys to do something other than expected. There was a bug in the history list code which could result in strange entries appearing at the start of the history list once enough history lines had been added to the list to cause the circular history buffer to wrap. This is now fixed. Version 1.3.3: Signal handling has been re-written, and documentation of its behaviour has been added to the gl_get_line(3) man page. In addition to eliminating race conditions, and appropriately setting errno for those signals that abort gl_get_line(), many more signals are now intercepted, making it less likely that the terminal will be left in raw mode by a signal that isn't trapped by gl_get_line(). A bug was also fixed that was leaving the terminal in raw mode if the editing mode was changed interactively between vi and emacs. This was only noticeable when running programs from old shells that don't reset terminal modes. Version 1.3.2: Tim Eliseo contributed a number of improvements to vi mode, including a fuller set of vi key-bindings, implementation of the vi constraint that the cursor can't backup past the point at which input mode was entered, and restoration of overwritten characters when backspacing in overwrite mode. There are also now new bindings to allow users to toggle between vi and emacs modes interactively. The terminal bell is now used in some circumstances, such as when an unrecognized key sequence is entered. This can be turned off by the new nobeep option in the tecla configuration file. Unrelated to the above, a problem under Linux which prevented ^Q from being used to resume terminal output after the user had pressed ^S, has been fixed. Version 1.3.1: In vi mode a bug was preventing the history-search-backward and history-search-forward actions from doing anything when invoked on empty lines. On empty lines they now act like up-history and down-history respectively, as in emacs mode. When creating shared libraries under Linux, the -soname directive was being used incorrectly. The result is that Linux binaries linked with the 1.2.3, 1.2.4 and 1.3.0 versions of the tecla shared libraries, will refuse to see other versions of the shared library until relinked with version 1.3.1 or higher. The configure script can now handle the fact that under Solaris-2.6 and earlier, the only curses library is a static one that hides in /usr/ccs/lib. Under Linux it now also caters for old versions of GNU ld which don't accept version scripts. The demos are now linked against the shared version of the library if possible. Previously they were always linked with the static version. Version 1.3.0: The major change in this release is the addition of an optional vi command-line editing mode in gl_get_line(), along with lots of new action functions to support its bindings. To enable this, first create a ~/.teclarc file if you don't already have one, then add the following line to it. edit-mode vi The default vi bindings, which are designed to mimic those of the vi editor as closely as possible, are described in the gl_get_line(3) man page. A new convenience function called ef_list_expansions() has been added for listing filename expansions. See the ef_list_expansions(3) man page for details. This is used in a new list-glob binding, bound to ^Xg in emacs mode, and ^G in vi input mode. A bug has been fixed in the key-binding table expansion code. This bug would have caused problems to anybody who defined more than about 18 personalized key-bindings in their ~/.teclarc file. Version 1.2.4: Buffered I/O is now used for writing to terminals, and where supported, cursor motion is done with move-n-positions terminfo capabilities instead of doing lots of move-1-position requests. This greatly improves how the library feels over slow links. You can now optionally compile different architectures in different directories, without having to make multiple copies of the distribution. This is documented in the INSTALL file. The ksh ~+ directive is now supported. Thanks to Markus Gyger for the above improvements. Documentation has been added to the INSTALL file describing features designed to facilitate configuration and installation of the library as part of larger packages. These features are intended to remove the need to modify the tecla distribution's configuration and build procedures when embedding the libtecla distribution in other package distributions. A previous fix to stop the cursor from warping when the last character of the input line was in the last column of the terminal, was only being used for the first terminal line of the input line. It is now used for all subsequent lines as well, as originally intended. Version 1.2.3: The installation procedure has been better automated with the addition of an autoconf configure script. This means that installers can now compile and install the library by typing: ./configure make make install On all systems this makes at least the normal static version of the tecla library. It also makes the reentrant version if reentrant POSIX functions are detected. Under Solaris, Linux and HP-UX the configuration script arranges for shared libraries to be compiled in addition to the static libraries. It is hoped that installers will return information about how to compile shared libraries on other systems, for inclusion in future releases, and to this end, a new PORTING guide has been provided. The versioning number scheme has been changed. This release would have been 1.2c, but instead will be refered to as 1.2.3. The versioning scheme, based on conventions used by Sun Microsystems, is described in configure.in. The library was also tested under HP-UX, and this revealed two serious bugs, both of which have now been fixed. The first bug prevented the library from writing control codes to terminals on big-endian machines, with the exception of those running under Solaris. This was due to an int variable being used where a char was needed. The second bug had the symptom that on systems that don't use the newline character as the control code for moving the cursor down a line, a newline wasn't started when the user hit enter. Version 1.2b: Two more minor bug fixes: Many terminals don't wrap the cursor to the next line when a character is written to the rightmost terminal column. Instead, they delay starting a new line until one more character is written, at which point they move the cursor two positions. gl_get_line() wasn't aware of this, so cursor repositionings just after writing the last character of a column, caused it to erroneously go up a line. This has now been remedied, using a method that should work regardless of whether a terminal exhibits this behavior or not. Some systems dynamically record the current terminal dimensions in environment variables called LINES and COLUMNS. On such systems, during the initial terminal setup, these values should override the static values read from the terminal information databases, and now do. Previously they were only used if the dimensions returned by terminfo/termcap looked bogus. Version 1.2a: This minor release fixes the following two bugs: The initial terminal size and subsequent changes thereto, weren't being noticed by gl_get_line(). This was because the test for the existence of TIOCWINSZ was erroneously placed before the inclusion of termios.h. One of the results was that on input lines that spanned more than one terminal line, the cursor occasionally jumped unexpectedly to the previous terminal line. On entering a line that wrapped over multiple terminal lines, gl_get_line() simply output a carriage-return line-feed at the point at which the user pressed return. Thus if one typed in such a line, then moved back onto one of the earlier terminal lines before hitting return, the cursor was left on a line containing part of the line that had just been entered. This didn't do any harm, but it looked a mess. Version 1.2: A new facility for looking up and completing filenames in UNIX-style paths has now been added (eg. you can search for, or complete commands using the UNIX PATH environment variable). See the pca_lookup_file(3) man page. The already existing filename completion callback can now be made selective in what types of files it lists. See the cpl_complete_word(3) man page. Due to its potential to break applications when changed, the use of the publically defined CplFileArgs structure to configure the cpl_file_completions() callback is now deprecated. The definition of this structure has been frozen, and its documentation has been removed from the man pages. It will remain supported, but if you have used it, you are recommended to switch to the new method, which involves a new opaque configuration object, allocated via a provided constructor function, configured via accessor functions, and eventually deleted with a provided destructor function. The cpl_file_completions() callback distinguishes which structure type it has been sent by virtue of a code placed at the start of the new structure by the constructor. It is assumed that no existing applications set the boolean 'escaped' member of the CplFileArgs structure to 4568. The new method is documented in the cpl_complete_word(3) man page. Version 1.1j This was the initial public release on freshmeat.org.