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I wonder why that was necessary, since NetBSD's libedit exists in a portable form. It is (or was) the default on OS X.

Edit: libedit is mentioned in the readme, and it's implied that the reason for this other library is code size.

Another reason is Windows. Even READLINE breaks when used on Windows with UTF-8 characters.

Yes, it is a shame that there are so many programs out there, that do not provide good line support because of the GPL issue.

Not everyone can or wants to use the GPL. We don't live in an ideal, purely altruistic world.

+1

There are even a lot of other OPEN SOURCE projects with licenses (Apache, BSD) which cannot use readline because of their restricted GPL (instead of LGPL).

Well, this isn't correct, it's just that the result would have to be distributed under terms of GPL. (Assuming the license is GPL compatible, which most of the ones you mentioned are).

This project goal is a bit more about replacing readline, but a big motivation for the original project is minimalism and trivial embeddability. It's all in the README.

@antirez: should the linked "linenoise NG" be considered a replacement for your linenoise?

I did diff on linenoise.c and linenoise.cpp (from NG) and very few lines are identical.

Check rlwrap.