Wednesday, March 25, 2009

vi command line history in ghci

This post has been obsolete for a while, as ghci has its own mechanism. There are a few resources that explain how to activate vi command line history within ghci. Some of them propose to use rlwrap. However, these didn't seem to work for my situation:
  • Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger)
  • GHC 6.10.1 (installed with MacPorts)
The reason being that my version of GHC does not use readline but rather editline. So the configuration is not ~/.inputrc but ~/.editrc, which in my case contains: bind -v To enable persistent history create directory ~/.ghc, so ghci can maintain the file ~/.ghc/ghci_history persistent between sessions. The default is a history of 100 commands but you can change that by adding this line to your ~/.ghc/ghci.conf: System.Console.Editline.Readline.stifleHistory 1000 which would increase your history to 1000 commands. I didn't find any explicit documentation about ghci command history configuration, but rather cobbled it together from patch files and developer mailing lists.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks! This really helped me out.

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  2. Modern version is here: http://trac.haskell.org/haskeline/wiki/UserPrefs

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