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
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Horea Haitonic (h o r e a h _at_ g m a i l . c o m)
