PyCmd

1. What is PyCmd? ----------------- PyCmd is a 'smart' command prompt extension for Windows' cmd.exe; its purpose is to emulate a few power features of UNIX shells (decent Tab-completion, persistent history, etc.) 2. What are some important features? ------------------------------------ a. Tab completion - when several completions are possible, list them instead of cycling through them - insert/remove quotes as needed - complete executables from the PATH and internal CMD.exe commands - complete names of environment variables, including pseudo-variables - complete wildcards - expand values of environment variables when completing b. Command history - the history is persistent across PyCmd sessions - one can search through the history (type a few filter characters, then Up/Down) - reordering is more intuitive than cmd's default strategy c. Command editing - support emacs key bindings - Copy-Paste using the keyboard (Ctrl-C/X/V or Emacs-style) - Undo/Redo with Ctrl-(Shift-)Z (regular style) or Ctrl-_ (Emacs-style) - dynamic, context-sensitive token expansion with Alt-/ (Emacs-style) - smart word-by-word navigation d. Other - show a highlighted prompt to make the buffer content more readable - smart prompt that abbreviates directory names to save screen space - Shift-PgUp/PgDn to scroll the buffer - history of recently visited directories (Alt-Left/Right/D on empty line) - expand ~ as %HOME% or %USERPROFILE% - Ctrl-D on an empty line closes PyCmd - show the current working directory in the window title 3. Known problems ----------------- - pushd/popd are not supported - %ERRORLEVEL% is always 0 when executing commands interactively - DOSKEY macros are not supported 4. Future plans --------------- - add some sort of a configuration mechanism (config file) - custom TAB-completion for the arguments of common commands - clean-up the mechanism that dispatches commands to cmd.exe (currently kind of hacky) 5. How do I download/install/run it? ------------------------------------ a. Download the binary distribution (created with Py2Exe, see http://www.py2exe.org/) from https://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/files/ Then, unpack and start PyCmd.exe. No installation is necessary. b. Fetch the Python sources from the repository at git://pycmd.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pycmd then start PyCmd.py in Python or run 'make' to build the binary distribution. You will need: - Python 2.5 from http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.5/ - Python for Windows extensions from https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/ - py2exe from http://www.py2exe.org/ - pefile from http://code.google.com/p/pefile/ NOTE: install with `python setup.py install_lib` as py2exe won't handle .egg files 6. How do I report a crash/problem? ----------------------------------- For any kind of bug, please use the bug tracker provided by SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=261720&atid=1127597 When reporting crashes, please try to locate and attach a crash log (look in %APPDATA%\PyCmd for files named crash-yyyymmdd_hhmmss.log). 7. Credits ---------- - The fish shell is an endless source of good ideas: http://fishshell.org/index.php - fsm.py is a nice package for implementing a Finite State Machine: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/146262 --------------------------------------------------- Horea Haitonic (h o r e a h _at_ g m a i l . c o m)