How can I use the up/down history keys in the SWI-Prolog console?

Question

When I press up/down, I should get - just like unix - the previous commands, but instead I get:

Welcome to SWI-Prolog (Multi-threaded, 32 bits, Version 6.0.0)
Copyright (c) 1990-2011 University of Amsterdam, VU Amsterdam
SWI-Prolog comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Please visit http://www.swi-prolog.org for details.

For help, use ?- help(Topic). or ?- apropos(Word).

1 ?- ['nc'].
% nc compiled into nc 0.00 sec, 84 clauses
true.

2 ?- listing.
true.

(I press 'Up' arrow key to get the 'listing' command back.. then..)

3 ?- **^[[A**

I compiled from source without any additional 'configure', or 'make' parameters.

In previous version of swi-prolog, I found this worked haphazardly.. sometimes the console got itself in a mess, and I had to press '.' to force it to terminate the current line, then the history would start working again.

But this latest version.. nada.. I am using ubuntu linux, bash shell. It feels like an o.s. environment issue, or a bug in swi-prolog. The arrow keys/history works fine at the linux level.

Overtop

Answer 1

I don't know about swi-prolog in particular, but I have used rlwrap to solve this problem for other interpreters that didn't feature built in editing features. It's very simple to use; you just have rlwrap run the command instead of running it directly.

Omentum

Thanks Frank. Since Ubuntu did it's usual update, my problem has disappeared. But if it comes back, I'll try this. – Overtop

Answer 2

You have to install package libreadline-dev on your host before compiling swiprolog to have arrows working.

Gio

This works, and should be flagged as the solution so far as I can see. – Jaban

Answer 3

This isn't actually an answer, more of a workaround, just in case anyone else has the same problem.

Although the 'up/down' arrow keys appear broken in 6.0.0 (and .1 - just tried it), the 'command-based' history recall seems to work ok, so it's possible to retrieve previous commands that way.

eg.

3 ?- !!.
listing.
true.

4 ?- L='fred', integer(L).
false.

5 ?- !!. 
L='fred', integer(L).
false.

6 ?- h.
    1   listing.
    2   listing.
    3   listing.
    4   L='fred', integer(L).
    5   L='fred', integer(L).
6 ?- !3.
listing.
true.

Overtop

Answer 4

I had the same issue in OSX, and I fixed it this way:

brew install rlwrap

# every time when launching swipl:
rlwrap swipl

Encaustic