[j-devel] Shell buffers on Windows

[Peter G. <pe...@ar...>]

Tonight's 0.17.2+ development snapshot is up:

    http://armedbear.org/j.zip          (source)
    http://armedbear.org/j-jar.zip      (just j.jar)

Shell buffers are now supported on Windows (2000 and XP, but not 9x).

"Supported" is too strong a word. Let's just say shell buffers are no
longer entirely prohibited on Windows.

What made me do this, having spent a few hours this morning running
Windows for the first time in a long time, was the realization that
Windows 2000 and Java 1.4.1_01 work a lot better in the area of shell
buffers than, say, Windows 98 and Java 1.2.

So I took out the code that required jpty on Windows, which was
effectively a prohibition on the use of shell buffers, since jpty had
to be built from source and could only be built with the Cygwin
toolset, which isn't really that big of a deal, but it's not the sort
of thing Windows folks normally do when installing an editor.

Bottom line, you can now use the binary distribution (or j.jar), and
all you have to do is add this line to C:\.j\prefs:

    enableExperimentalFeatures = true

Then you can hit Alt F9 and get a shell buffer on the current
directory.

Bear in mind that I haven't actually added any new code to make shell
buffers work -well- on Windows. In fact, as things stand, they suffer
from a spurious echo of the typed command, which really needs to be
filtered out. But tomorrow is another day.

I've only tested this with Windows 2000 and Sun Java 1.4.1_01. If
you're not running Java 1.4, you may encounter difficulties, and not
just in this area.

On Linux, jpty is still required, since without it, programs that write
to the terminal device rather than stdout (or stderr) just don't work
right; the ssh password prompt appears in the xterm from which you
started j, for example, rather than in the shell buffer where you typed
"ssh". But Linux users are more likely to be willing to build jpty, so
that evens things out a bit.

In other news, the "lisp" command, without any arguments, now tries to
run Armed Bear Lisp, which won't actually work in the wild (as the
antivirus vendors like to say) until I get the Lisp code into the
normal distribution. You can still do, for example, Alt X, "lisp sbcl",
to run sbcl.

Lisp shells no longer require jpty on Windows, but they still do on
Unix, because of the problem mentioned above. Unless you're trying to
run Armed Bear Lisp, which is immune to that problem, but doesn't
exist, generally speaking, in other respects... ;)

Thanks for your support.

-Peter