So I wanted to share with you this little project of mine. I delved into "retro-necromancy" and reanimated one very old UNIX utility called ile written by Robert Pendleton in 1988. I found it on one of the Walnut Creek source code CDs from 1994.
What it does is simply works like an input line editor (hence ile) for shells and programs that do not support interactive line editing. To put it simply, it adds Emacs-style keybindings like ^A, ^E, ^K, ^U and so on and command history that you can easily navigate.
Of course, these days it's hard to find a shell that doesn't support line editing.
But this little tool can still be usable, for example, with ed. It's nice to have Emacs-style editing in ed.
It can work like shell replacement or just run like a "middleman" between any given program. It respects terminal settings and doesn't get in a way. Keybindings are configurable.
Needless to say, the code from 1988 wouldn't run on any modern system. It was written in K&R style because there was no ANSI C standard yet! And #UNIX was quite a different beast back then.
So I ported it to modern systems, rewrote outdated bits (like sgttyb ioctls and brutal utmp handling).
Currently it builds and runs on #Linux, #OpenBSD, #FreeBSD and #NetBSD. Hopefully without too much bugs.
You can find it on Codeberg:
https://codeberg.org/chesheer/ile
chesheer
npub14h…g2yzn
2026-06-29 18:59:31 UTC
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npub14hwd80f4xt6dq7fqrgz9scxdw0zy6fh2tttey6x865e0s4h37gvstg2yznSeen on
wss://relay.momostr.pinkPublished at
2026-06-29 18:59:31 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "So I wanted to share with you this little project of mine. I delved into \"retro-necromancy\" and reanimated one very old UNIX utility called ile written by Robert Pendleton in 1988. I found it on one of the Walnut Creek source code CDs from 1994.\nWhat it does is simply works like an input line editor (hence ile) for shells and programs that do not support interactive line editing. To put it simply, it adds Emacs-style keybindings like ^A, ^E, ^K, ^U and so on and command history that you can easily navigate.\nOf course, these days it's hard to find a shell that doesn't support line editing.\nBut this little tool can still be usable, for example, with ed. It's nice to have Emacs-style editing in ed.\nIt can work like shell replacement or just run like a \"middleman\" between any given program. It respects terminal settings and doesn't get in a way. Keybindings are configurable.\nNeedless to say, the code from 1988 wouldn't run on any modern system. It was written in K\u0026R style because there was no ANSI C standard yet! And #UNIX was quite a different beast back then.\nSo I ported it to modern systems, rewrote outdated bits (like sgttyb ioctls and brutal utmp handling).\nCurrently it builds and runs on #Linux, #OpenBSD, #FreeBSD and #NetBSD. Hopefully without too much bugs.\nYou can find it on Codeberg:\nhttps://codeberg.org/chesheer/ile",
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