[PyCrust] Some enhancements. Any interest?

[Bill B. <wb...@gm...>]

Don't know if anyone reads this list these days or is working on pycrust at
all anymore (sourceforge is proudly announcing the 0.6 release from 2001
still), but I made some changes to my version of pycrust and wondered if
there was any interest in them.  Basically I've haven't been using python
that long, but it seems to me that among the shells I've tried pycrust is
the best.  But it lacks some of the nice features of ipython.   I talked to
the main fellow behind iPython and he said there is talk about merging
ipython and pycrust, but it's still a long ways off, blah blah blah.

So here's a summary of the changes I made in no particular order:

* Made up and down arrows go through history (currently ctrl-up ctrl-down).
I don't see why anyone would want the most common option to be moving the
cursor around the screen.  Most shells don't have any way to move the curso=
r
around the screen other than click and drag.

* Added forward history search (to go with the backward history search boun=
d
to F8).  Also made the history search default to normal non-search history
scrolling if done at the beginning of the line (instead of doing nothing
like it used to)

* Made ctrl-up and ctrl-down do up and down history search (ctrl-up does
what F8 does)

* Added Ctrl-U key combo to erase the current line (like in bash, and like
Esc currently does)

* Modified the about dialog so it doesn't beep (using ScrolledMessageDialog
instead of MessageDialog)  (Beep was annoying me)

* Modified the help dialog so it doesn't beep (again using
ScrolledMessageDialog), and made it actually display the help text rather
than telling you to type 'shell.help()'.  (Annoying!)

* Made exit,close,quit actually quit the shell, after asking if it's ok,
rather than tell you to click on the close box.  (also annoying to me :-) )
[incidentally this was done by creating a little helper class whose __repr_=
_
method does the closing.  Not sure if this is considered horrible python
style or not, but it lets you type just 'quit' instead of 'quit()'.

* Changed the settings to be saved in $HOME on all platforms if $HOME is
set.  wx's GetUserDataDir() ignores $HOME on Windows because it's not
standard, but my opinion is that a lot of programmers do set it, and so, if
it's set, it should be used instead of the standard "Documents and Settings=
"
folder.

* In my own settings I added a 'cd' and 'ls' command to navigate the
directory structure more easily. These might be nice to have in pycrust
itself.


Wishes for further pycrust features that should be relatively easy to add:

* A current directory display, perhaps with history of recently used
directoryies.  I'm thinking a popdown combobox, like Matlab has.
* A way to change the shell's font
* A better way to handle magic shell level commands like 'exit' or 'cd' or
'ls'.  I looked at the interpreter class a bit, but it wasn't clear right
off where the best place to examine commands and "intervene" if they
shouldn't be evaluated by python.  It would be nice if you could make those
more like unix shell commands.  i.e. 'ls c:\foo' would work (instead of)
"ls(r'c:\foo')", and you could get tab completion of filenames etc.

Wishes for things that would be slightly more work:
* User settable key combos instead of hard coded keys.
* Debugger integration

Let me know if anyone is interested in these changes and I can post the
code.  For now I just made copies of the only files I changed (PyCrust.py,
crust.py, shell.py, and version.py) and put them in a separate module so
that I can have both the original pycrust and my modded version coexisting.


--Bill