I use Term::ReadLine::Gnu for its line-editing and input history retrieval capability. If I forget to install it, I'm reminded the moment I run a script that uses readline, hit the left-arrow at the prompt, and garbage splats out (^[[D). That's my cue to cpanm Term::ReadLine::Gnu.

However, while talking a Mac user through installing a Perl program I wrote that uses readline, I discovered that installing the Gnu version from scratch is harder than I'd thought. First, I had him install the Xcode Command Line Tools as a prerequisite for perlbrew, and then perl v5.34 and cpanm. But cpanm Term::ReadLine::Gnu failed: The libreadline you are using is the libedit library.  Use the GNU Readline Library. The simplest solution to this I could find involved installing homebrew. Homebrew's easy enough for me to use, but I felt like I was expending an awful lot of effort to provide a Mac terminal user with basic command-line editing.

Long story short, I installed Term::ReadLine::Perl and it mostly works (haven't fully tested it yet) but, because my prompt uses sequences from Term::ANSIColor, it writes '0m ' after the prompt! And if I remove those sequences, my keystrokes appear in white.

Since I normally don't have this kind of trouble doing something easy in Perl, I figure I'm overlooking something very obvious. Readline-Gnu "just worked" for me; can't Readline-Perl do the same, at least for line editing and input retrieval?

In reply to Term::ReadLine and line-editing by ibm1620

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