What program can help a REPL shell remember and search history?

Question

I'm playing with Paul Graham's arc, and it's getting really annoying that the up arrow inserts ^[[A instead of the previous command, and ^R doesn't work as in shell. I vaguely remember there being a simple way to run Arc's REPL in a program which will remember the input history - does anyone know what it is?

Answer 1

Perhaps you're thinking of rlwrap?

Answer 2

I like rlwrap too, but other options include:

• Emacs modes:
  • shell
  • term
  • comint
  • Slime (works with Common Lisps and Clojure, probably not with Arc)
• ssfe (the frontend part of sirc)
• jline (especially if the REPL is written in Java, which arc is not)

Answer 3

nex3's arc on github comes with a script arc.sh which calls rlwrap by default, and an emacs mode to use the history with alt+P and alt+N.