Interactive / REPL mode, like sqlite3 tool?

[snej]

I want to make a tool with an interactive mode: if you give the essential args but no subcommand, it will prompt you for a subcommand line, execute it, then prompt again, until you use Ctrl-D or a “quit” subcommand to exit. This is very useful to avoid having to repeat prerequisite args like a database name or URL.

SQLite's sqlite3 tool is a perfect example of this.

clikt doesn’t seem to support this. I’m sure I can implement it myself, but speaking from experience — I've done this in C++ — there are various annoying bits like finding a ‘readline’ library with decent editing, and then having to split the command line into arguments (including handling quotes).

So I’m hoping someone has built a tool like this and I can look at its source code … ?

[ajalt]

For interactive TUI applications like that, you could use mordant, which powers clikt, or mosaic.

[snej]

Those libraries look nice! But they’re unrelated to what I’m asking. I don’t need any fancy TUI rendering. What I need is

• a function to read a line with decent editing support, like GNU readline et al — neither library has that, AFAICT
• a function to parse an input line into arguments, handling some subset of shell quoting
• knowledge of how to put this together with clikt to interactively run subcommands