GNU Readline

Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 6 years (2019–2024), in 3 threads.

People raised many different problems with GNU Readline, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

Pasting many lines of SQL slows down progressively as characters are entered2024-06-26
Forward history search clashes with terminal flow control, so changing search direction is hard2024-06-26
Obscure Ctrl/Meta letter shortcuts for cursor movement are harder to remember than arrow keys2022-11-29
Ctrl+A means home in emacs theme, so select-all is unavailable and selecting text is awkward2022-11-29
Emacs-style shortcuts like Ctrl-A and Ctrl-F are confusing to people unfamiliar with Emacs2022-11-29
Readline's shortcuts are confusing for users who are not Emacs users2022-11-29
Tab completion shows matches in a one-line window, slow to narrow down filenames2019-08-23
Beginners can't tell there is anything to learn2019-08-22
Moving between lines of multi-line input requires awkward left and right cursor movement2019-08-22