I found an (old) existing issue: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GROOVY-8162
I'll attach a few screenshots there and use that for additional discussion. Paul. On Mon, Jun 23, 2025 at 3:45 PM Paul King <pa...@asert.com.au> wrote: > > Hi folks, > > I have been looking at what is involved with migrating our Groovysh repl > from JLine2 to JLine3. > > You can find the latest version in the jline3 branch. It would be great if > anyone has spare time and would like to help assess whether we think we can > knock this into shape in time for Groovy 5. > > The easiest way to try it out is switch (once fetched) to the jline3 > branch. > > Run "./gradlew iG" to build. > Then run "subprojects/groovy-binary/build/install/bin/groovysh2". > Hitting <TAB> can show some of the commands. > I found some implementation issues using our current ":command" commands > and so have instead used "/command" like jshell. The colon variants are > supported as an undocumented alias at the moment. We'd likely need some > changes to jline if we wanted the colon variants as the only variant. > > That branch has two versions side-by-side: > * The groovysh command is our old version with minimal work done to "just > port" from jline2 to jline3. (This might be currently broken but I'll fix > it soon.) > * The groovysh2 command tries to leverage many features from JLine3 to > make a feature-rich repl but also minimise the amount of code we'd have to > maintain. > > The two versions do parsing/completing/commands slightly differently. My > current thinking is that we'd throw away most of the earlier commands since > they are covered by alternatives. We need to see which, if any, of the > existing completers/parsing we'd like to bring across. > > The JLine3 project's repo has a Groovy-based repl as an example demo > application which shows off many built-in JLine3 features and widgets. I > have based our repl on that demo and kept a lot of the functionality. We'll > have to decide which features, if any, we want to keep. I have copied some > of the repl-related files from the JLine3 repo to ours. I imagine there > will need to be an assessment of which of those files we may be able to > leave on the JLine side of things. > > There will be lots of tidying up to do (dependency metadata, license file > updates, etc.) but the first thing to do is work out which bits we'd want > to keep or need further work. > > Things that I know need some work: > * The /grab completer completes maven coordinates based on dependencies > found in the users ~/.m2/repository directory. We might like to allow that > to be configured to use ~/.groovy/grapes or a URL to maven central. > * Theme support is "enabled" for syntax highlighting and existing commands > let you switch e.g. between light and dark highlighting, but I don't know > what parts are actually affected when you make such changes. > * There are some completers like BackslashEscapeCompleter that are only in > the old version. > * There is a rudimentary DocFinder class that looks up javadoc and > groovydoc using a browser. Our old version also handled GDK documentation > and had fallbacks if browsers weren't found. > * Many switches and system properties haven't been converted over > * I18N message resources are rather limited in the new version > * Interpreter mode hasn't been looked at > * testing on various platforms > * test suite is hard-coded to JLine2 implementation details in numerous > places > > If anyone does get some time, please get in touch and if there are bits of > work that can be divided up, that would be great. I am about to head off on > a mini-break, so may not respond for a few days, but I plan to work on this > again when I return. > > Cheers, Paul. > >
