nullprogram.com/blog/2009/02/20/
I came across a very interesting tool the other day called rlwrap. It wraps the
readline library over just about any interactive text input
program. The readline library provides basic editing and history. It's
handy for those programs that don't provide their own line editing
facilities.
It tries to be as transparent as possible, detecting yes/no prompts
and passwords, so it should still be reasonable under those
conditions.
If you can't think of anything to try it with, try it with
cat. Instant line editor!
rlwrap cat > some-file.txt
Or with Festival.
rlwrap festival --tts
It will also turn incorrectly compiled shells on your system into
something usable. On my system (Debian GNU/Linux), csh
isn't usable without rlwrap.
rlwrap csh