I've been following this thread with interest, as I too have been annoyed that Maxima didn't have GNU Readline capabilities. Since none of the early responses gave a solution or workaround I would be comfortable with, I wrote the attached Perl script to act as a Readline-aware front end for Maxima. (Today's posts by Camm Maguire and James Amundson regarding gcl 2.5.0 are interesting and make me wonder whether gcl 2.4.0--the version I used when building maxima--is also supposed to have Readline support. I'll probably investigate this eventually, but for now my script serves my needs.) The script requires the following five Perl modules: Term::ReadLine Term::ReadLine::Gnu Expect IO::Tty IO::Stty and, of course, you need the Readline library. I have no doubt the script can be broken, and it's certainly not elegant (you type 'qqq' to exit, for example), but it's been working for me for a couple of days. -- Mark Lawrence www.unified-eng.com
Attached file: max