Re: [PyCrust] Some enhancements. Any interest?

[Sebastian H. <ha...@ms...>]

Hi Bill,
Yes *I* was somehow on this list (didn't know though) ;-)
Good to hear that PyCrust is alive !
I would suggest:
Please repost your message directly to the wxPython-users list.
With the last update of 2.6.2  there have been some improvements to 
PyCrust  - some overlap with yours ...

I certainly agree that the sourceforge page is nothing but a trap !! It 
should be deleted ! Or clearly stated that wxPython.org (maybe it's 
wiki) is the place to look.

Thanks for your work.
- Sebastian Haase



Bill Baxter wrote:
> 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 cursor around the screen other than click and drag.
> 
> * Added forward history search (to go with the backward history search 
> bound 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