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+# Linenoise
+
+A minimal, zero-config, readline replacement.
+
+## Can a line editing library be 20k lines of code?
+
+Line editing with some support for history is a really important feature for command line utilities. It's much better to just hit the up arrow and edit on syntax error or to try a slightly different command. But apparently code dealing with terminals is some sort of Black Magic: readline is 30k lines of code, libedit 20k. Is it reasonable to link small utilities to huge libraries just to get a minimal support for line editing?
+
+It's a matter of coding philosophy. For me shipping zero-configuration software is very important. Software that just works, uncompressing the tar.gz and typing make. Also not enabling line editing if readline is not present in the system is lame: as it is not a blocking requirements many configuration script will just drop the support if you don't have the lib installed. The result is a pollution of binaries without line editing support.
+
+So I spent more or less two hours doing a reality check resulting in this little library: is it *really* needed for a line editing library to be 20k lines of code?
+
+## Terminals, in 2010.
+
+Apparently almost every terminal you can happen to use today has some kind of support for VT100 alike escape sequences. So I tried to write a lib using just very basic VT100 features. The resulting library appears to work everywhere I tried to use it.
+
+Since it's so young I guess there are a few bugs, or the lib may not compile or work with some operating system, but it's a matter of a few weeks and eventually we'll get it right, and there will be no excuses for not shipping command line tools without built-in line editing support.
+
+The library is currently less than 400 lines of code. In order to use it in your project just look at the *example.c* file in the source distribution, it is trivial. Linenoise is BSD code, so you can use both in free software and commercial software.
+
+Please fork it and add something interesting and send me a pull request.
+
+Send feedbacks to antirez at gmail