key combos at the command line

[James Platt]

I am working on an example command line chat client in Racket and I need a method to switch from text chat to commands for things like sending a binary file or executing a utility to check the network connection. I am thinking of something like control key combinations. What is the easiest way to do something like this in Racket?

[schle...@gmail.com]

I don't really understand what you want to do exactly.

I think mostly you have to implement it yourself, possibly by using something like https://docs.racket-lang.org/charterm/index.html or maybe https://docs.racket-lang.org/lux-charterm/index.html

https://pkgd.racket-lang.org/pkgn/search?tags=terminal

I would guess that the rmacs package could contain quite a few useful tricks, but haven't looked at it in depth.

I also tried a few emacs-style key-combos in the racket repl only one, that I always use in terminals, worked: ctrl-r for reverse history search

It allows you to quickly eval a previously entered expression in the repl, to me it seems that this is implemented in racket somewhere,

but I am not sure whether it is in the default repl, or whether it has something to do with xrepl. https://docs.racket-lang.org/xrepl/index.html?q=xrepl

That said you could have a prefix for commands like : or / for just typing static commands, or something more interactive by managing the terminal buffer yourself with something like charterm.

I think lux with the lux-charterm might be a good way to build your terminal application from many little pieces that are combined to form the full application,

but I haven't used it so far, would be nice to find a medium sized example for a lux terminal application.

[schle...@gmail.com]

There is also the possibility to do these other things outside of your terminal application. If you are on linux you could just ctrl-z to send your terminal app to the background (suspend it) and get back to your normal terminal execute some rsync command or something to send your file, "jobs" command then lists background processes, "fg" brings back the most recent one (your terminal app). Thats the simplified description see the manpages or google for more info on that.

But I have the impression that you want to do all these things within your application?

[James Platt]

Thanks for the suggestions. I had not thought about using "terminal" as a search term since I was expecting to find something that would implement keyboard shortcuts regardless of whether you are using the command line (Terminal in Mac and Linux or CMD in Windows) or not. It doesn't look like any of those packages will do what I want easily. Rackterm would work, since you can attach menus to it and define the keyboard shortcuts there, except I want something which will work in an ssh session. The command prefix idea seems like the easiest way to go. I think IRC does something like that.

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