[Bug-readline] Re: readline eats previous text on line

[Chet Ramey]

> Using guile 1.8, which uses readline, I find that if I make a call to
> readline("prompt: ");
> that anything I have already output on the current line is deleted and 
> replaced with "prompt: ".  If I call
> readline("");,
> then I get a completely blank line.

Readline, especially when it's in a locale supporting multibyte characters,
is quite careful to keep track of exactly where the cursor is on the screen
line.  Unfortunately in this case, sometimes it erases and redraws the line
to do so.

Readline-5.2, just released, is much better about this than 5.1, but you
cannot completely rely on the redisplay code not needing to erase what's
on the line if it determines that that is the way to most efficiently
perform redisplay.

Chet

-- 
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Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    address@hidden    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/