SBCL REPL use up arrow keys to show history

Question

I have installed SBCL onto OSX through Macports. When inside the REPL, it would be very convenient to be able to use ↑ and ↓ to iterate through the previous commands (similar to the behavior in bash or Python's REPL).

Is there a way to enable this functionality?

Answer 1

Install rlwrap and then run rlwrap sbcl.

You can get rlwrap through macports or homebrew.

It's pretty much as simple as that.

Answer 2

You could also also use Linedit. This is SBCL REPL specific, so it causes problems in other environments (like SLIME).

Or, you can try the SBCL-Readline project. Not sure how this works in SLIME, haven't tried it personally.

Both Uses UFFI to implement the use of C libraries. Just make sure to skim through the source code and change the paths to libraries etc for your system, before trying them out!