Home | Back
This is a terse description of the new features added to readline-6.3 since
the release of readline-6.2.

New Features in Readline

a.  Readline is now more responsive to SIGHUP and other fatal signals when
    reading input from the terminal or performing word completion but no
    longer attempts to run any not-allowable functions from a signal handler
    context.

b.  There are new bindable commands to search the history for the string of
    characters between the beginning of the line and the point
    (history-substring-search-forward, history-substring-search-backward)

c.  Readline allows quoted strings as the values of variables when setting
    them with `set'.  As a side effect, trailing spaces and tabs are ignored
    when setting a string variable's value.

d.  The history library creates a backup of the history file when writing it
    and restores the backup on a write error.

e.  New application-settable variable: rl_filename_stat_hook: a function called
    with a filename before using it in a call to stat(2).  Bash uses it to
    expand shell variables so things like $HOME/Downloads have a slash
    appended.

f.  New bindable function `print-last-kbd-macro', prints the most-recently-
    defined keyboard macro in a reusable format.

g.  New user-settable variable `colored-stats', enables use of colored text
    to denote file types when displaying possible completions (colored analog
    of visible-stats).

h.  New user-settable variable `keyseq-timout', acts as an inter-character
    timeout when reading input or incremental search strings.

i.  New application-callable function: rl_clear_history. Clears the history list
    and frees all readline-associated private data.

j.  New user-settable variable, show-mode-in-prompt, adds a characters to the
    beginning of the prompt indicating the current editing mode.

k.  New application-settable variable: rl_input_available_hook; function to be
    called when readline detects there is data available on its input file
    descriptor.

l.  Readline calls an application-set event hook (rl_event_hook) after it gets
    a signal while reading input (read returns -1/EINTR but readline does not
    handle the signal immediately) to allow the application to handle or
    otherwise note it.

m.  If the user-settable variable `history-size' is set to a value less than
    0, the history list size is unlimited.

n.  New application-settable variable: rl_signal_event_hook; function that is
    called when readline is reading terminal input and read(2) is interrupted
    by a signal.  Currently not called for SIGHUP or SIGTERM.