A feature-rich line editor - powering Nushell

Reedline is a line editor in the tradition of bash's readline and zsh's zle, built for what people expect from a modern shell: syntax highlighting, completions, interactive menus, history hints, multiline editing and more. It is currently primarily developed as the interactive editor for nushell, striving to provide a pleasant interactive experience.

Community and roadmap

Talk to us in the #reedline channel of the Nushell Discord, ideally before you start a larger change.

Roadmap:

• Prompt, history, hints and the API
• Edit modes: emacs, vi and helix
• Completion menu: actions, insertion and display

Features

• EditMode: Emacs, Vi and Helix with configurable keybindings, switchable at runtime.
• Validator: multiline editing.
• Highlighter: syntax highlighting.
• Completer and Menu: completions in a columnar, list, IDE-style or description menu.
• History: plain file or SQLite, shared between sessions, with interactive search.
• Hinter: fish-style autosuggestions.
• Prompt: custom and transient prompts, semantic prompt markers (OSC 133).
• StatusLine: a live line under the buffer.
• ExternalPrinter: output from other threads while the prompt is active.
• Undo and redo, system clipboard, visual selection, abbreviations and auto pairs.
• External editor, bracketed paste, kitty keyboard protocol and mouse click to move the cursor.

Getting started

cargo add reedline

use reedline::{DefaultPrompt, Reedline, Signal};

let mut line_editor = Reedline::create();
let prompt = DefaultPrompt::default();

loop {
    match line_editor.read_line(&prompt) {
        Ok(Signal::Success(buffer)) => println!("We processed: {buffer}"),
        Ok(Signal::CtrlD) | Ok(Signal::CtrlC(_)) => {
            println!("\nAborted!");
            break;
        }
        x => println!("Event: {x:?}"),
    }
}

• examples/: one runnable program per feature. Start with cargo run --example demo.
• docs.rs/reedline: the API documentation.
• KEYBINDINGS.md: the default keybindings.

Crate features

All off by default.

• system_clipboard: cut, copy and paste to the system clipboard, beside reedline's own cut buffer.
• bashisms: history expansion such as !! and !$.
• sqlite: SqliteBackedHistory, with SQLite linked statically.
• sqlite-dynlib: the same, linked dynamically. Requires sqlite >= 3.45.3.
• libc: crossterm uses libc instead of rustix.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Alternatives

• rustyline

License

MIT