I'm writing some shell utilities that will see a lot of punishment, and
would benefit greatly from some common UI idioms. Specifically, I'd
like to know how to perform:
* keyword completion - tab-expanding a term from a known set,
ideally with some facility for partial completion and
presentation of remaining options
* in-place progress indicators - the ability to count from 1%
to 100%, without occupying more than one line of the buffer
* external-editor handoffs, whereby my code can call $EDITOR,
wait for it to exit, and then pick up the file from /tmp, or
wherever.
I can call external widgets if necessary, but system and shell
portability would be swell, as I'm developing with tcsh/Mac OS X and
deploying with bash under FreeBSD. I've been poking through CPAN and
various O'Reilly titles, but either the topic is too cozy a niche, or
I'm not going about the search properly.
Any suggestions or pointers would be appreciated.
-nat
