I am using some software with a command line interface. Despite being a mature commercial product (Mathematica - forgive my mention of a non-GPL software), there is no way to edit an input line other than backspace (ie you cannot move cursor left and right, either by arrows or other keystrokes, ctrl-b ctrl-f also do nothing). Only adding to my frustration, there is no way to scroll through history either. I have become very accustomed to standard interfaces where I can use the up arrow to scroll through history and edit any command and resubmit revised lines etc, or at least paste something from some other source and edit it directly on the terminal itself.

I regularly use screen and thought that it might provide the functionality that I seek, but I can only copy and paste from it. There is no way to edit the buffer before pasting it into the application. Well I could pump it to a buffer file and edit there then pop it from the buffer file, but that is more work than I want, and I could just do that through a gui anyway.

What I am asking is if there is any wrapper application that will capture input and allow editing and history etc. When enter is pressed it could then pass the line on to the application it wraps.

Yes I am aware of and use other friendly computer algebra systems such as maxima, yacas, sage etc, that are better designed with respect to the command line. I have access to the software through a school server, and have some particular needs for this application specifically.

Thanks

You can probably wrap your STDIN with socat and its READLINE implementation, giving you the same command line editing you have in bash, etc.

http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/do....html#EXAMPLES

This is exactly the kind of answer I needed. The socat program looked very promising, though from the examples, no direct translation was apparent. I looked up the READLINE option on the same page which states "This requires the GNU readline and history libraries." The readline front end, rlfe, is exactly the solution I need. In short:

ANSWER
This does exactly what I want, in-line editing with history abilities. Now the arrow keys work as well as in-line copy paste etc, just as any other emacs style command line interface can do. And for those die hards out there, vi style can also be invoked.

I am not sure if it is packaged with all distos, but my gentoo already had the library with the front end (probably due to build dependencies), while an ubuntu box had neither installed but is readily available with apt-get install rlfe.

On another note I also discovered that the sage program can become a shallow interface wrapper for mathematica as well by invoking
It isn't as good as rlfe, since mathematica's prompt "In[8]:= " can disappear. A quick check also reveals that sage uses the readline library.

Thank you Mr. C, I needed a kick in the right direction.

I have since found a better solution, by using the command rlwrap. This is very similar to rlfe, but with tab completion, history saving and complete logging. Also the documentation is much better, and rlwrap is more commonly used for these types of problems. To generate a command list for completetion I did

I saw another poster mention the same thing. Good stuff.

How about simplifying your command to: