WHAT'S NEW
twander 2.xx:
*** PRELIMINARY BETA COMMENTS ***
- The licensing terms have been clarified. Non-Commercial use of the
program is free with a $20 US per user donation recommended.
This fee is mandatory for commercial users.
- *MANY* bug fixes and code cleanup including a nasty one with
RH linux that prevented 'twander' from opening the user's
home directory.
- The -b, -f, -n, -w, -s, -x, -y command line options have
been removed. You can now set color, font, and size values as
options in the configuration file (as well as color and
font values for menus and help information - see below
for more details).
- Width/Height now default to 800 and 600 *PIXELS* respectively.
Previous versions did not really count pixels correctly.
- You can now include references to any of the variable types
in a manually entered command line. Syntax is the same as for
command definitions in the configuration file.
- Command History has been implemented. All commands, regardless of
how they were invoked are saved in a history buffer and available
via a History Menu. Commands entered manually are saved as typed.
Other command invocations are saved with any variables (Built-In,
Environment, User-Defined) dereferenced and substituted.
- There is now a Help Menu.
- There are now accelerator key and mouse shortcuts for each of the
menus:
Menu Accelerator Mouse Shortcut
-----------------------------------------------------
Command Alt-c RightButton
Directory Alt-d Shift-RightButton
History Alt-h Control-Shift-RightButton
Help Alt-l None
- A new "Directory Shortcuts" feature has been added. This
is done by adding statements of the following form to the
configuration file:
DIRSCnn = some path # left side must be all caps as shown
# nn is from 1-12
# or 01-12 (leading 0 is optional)
Each such statement will do two things: Preload "some path"
into the Directory Menu and Bind the function key associated
with 'nn' to the path so pressing that key navigates there.
For example this command will cause twander to move to
/usr/local/bin when you press F10:
DIRSC10 = /usr/local/bin
- twander debug facilities have been vastly improved. The -d
command line argument (and the DEBUGLEVEL option - see below)
now takes an argument whose value is understood to be a
bitfield with these assignments:
Bit 0 - Dump selected items and quit
Bit 1 - Dump internal variables
Bit 2 - Dump symbol table
Bit 3 - Dump command table
Bit 4 - Dump execution strings (as program runs)
Bit 5 - Dump key bindings
Bit 6 - Dump directory stack (as program runs)
Bit 7 - Dump command history stack after each command execution
Values can be expressed as hex or integer on the command line.
So, for example, 'twander.py -d 3' dumps the internal variables
on stdout and exits immediately.
- You can set your default twander command line arguments
in an environment variable called TWANDER.
- You can now set a great many twander options, including those
set via environment variable/command line directly in
the configuration file. This provides access to even more
program features than available on the command line.
The priority of options processing, from lowest to highest is:
1) Defaults coded into program
2) Options set in configuration file
3) Options set in environment variable
4) Options set on command line.
Options are set in the configuration file using this syntax:
OPTIONNAME = value # OPTIONAME must be all upper-case
Available options - values shown are their defaults coded into
the program:
Booleans - RHS must be "TRUE" or "FALSE" - case-insensitive
-----------------------------------------------------------
AUTOREFRESH = TRUE # Automatically refresh dir view
NODETAILS = FALSE # Never allow details to be seen
NONAVIGATE = FALSE # User can't leave starting directory
USETHREADS = TRUE # Unix Only: False means use traditional spawned system calls.
USEWIN32ALL = TRUE # If FALSE, will not use win32 even if present
WARN = TRUE # Show warning
Numerics - RHS must be a number
------------------------------------------------------------
DEBUGLEVEL = 0 # Set how much debug output you want
FSZ = 12 # Display Font size
MFSZ = 12 # Menu Font size
HSZ = 10 # Help Font size
HEIGHT = 600 # Initial window height in pixels
MAXDIR = 32 # Max entries in Directory Menu
MAXDIRBUF = 250 # Max size of directory buffer
MAXHIST = 32 # Max entries in History Menu
MAXHISTBUF = 250 # Max size of command history buffer
MAXNESTING = 32 # Max level of variable nesting allowed
REFRESHINT = 3000 # ms between refreshes - inaccurate, but bigger=longer
WIDTH = 800 # Initial window width in pixels
STARTX = 0 # Initial window x coordinate in pixels
STARTY = 0 # Initial window y coordinate in pixels
Strings - RHS cannot be blank
-------------------------------------------------------------
BCOLOR = black # Background color
CMDSHELL = [] # String to prepend in front of manually entered commands.
FCOLOR = green # Foreground color
MBARCOL = beige # Menubar color
MBCOLOR = beige # Menu Background color
MFCOLOR = black # Menu Foreground color
HBCOLOR = lightgreen # Help Background color
HFCOLOR = black # Help Foreground color
FNAME = Courier # Font name
FWT = bold # Font weight
MFNAME = Courier # Menu Font name
MFWT = bold # Menu Font weight
HFNAME = Courier # Help Font name
HFWT = italic # Help Font weight
QUOTECHAR = " # Character (or string) to use when quoting substitutions
STARTDIR = $HOME or ./ # Directory in which to start
All of these except STARTDIR will be observed on a configuration
file reload while the program is running, so you can edit the
configuration and see how these variables change things.
- There is a new Built-In variable called [YESNO:some text]. It
allows you to put a Yes/No popup anywhere in a command definition.
This is most useful in warning the user they are about to do
something dangerous:
d BigTimeDelete xterm -l -e [YESNO:Are You Sure You Want To Delete Selected Entries?] rm -rf [DSELECTIONS]
A "Yes" response causes normal program execution, "No" aborts the
command.
- Since Win32 file/directory names are case-insensitive,
twander now sorts them as such. Previously, 'ZEBRA' would
appear before 'echo' in a twander display.
- Most previous error conditions have been changed to warnings so
that the program is more forgiving and will keep running after
such a condition. This is especially true of problems in
the configuration file, which formerly cause the program to
exit. Now, the offending line is just ignored.
- The various interactive popup dialogs allow intra-line editing
with both the local conventions as well as emacs-style key
editing. This was true previously, but was not documented.
- If you are running on Win32 and have Mark Hammond's 'win32all'
extensions installed, a number of Win32-specific features are
enabled:
a) You can now navigate ".." from root or use the Ctrl-k key to
get a Drive List View of all available Win32 drives.
You can view either simple or detailed information in this
screen and toggle between the two views as with normal
directory displays.
b) The file/directory mode will be displayed showing Win32
attributes:
d - Directory
A - Archive
C - Compressed
H - Hidden
N - Normal
R - Read-Only
S - System
c) The Win32 user/group names will appear for each displayed
item, instead of "win32user" and "win32group".
Set the USEWIN32ALL option to False in the configuration file
to disable these features.
You can also toggle between the Unix view and win32all view
via a new program function, TOGWIN32ALL which is mapped to
Control-w by default.
- You can now resize fonts while running 'twander' without having to
change the respective configuration file parameters. Two commands
have been added to do this:
Control-[ Reduces font size (FONTDECR)
Control-] Increases " " (FONTINCR)
The fonts for Menus/Menu Contents/Help (but not About) are resized
by subtracting/adding 1 to each respective font size. This means
the fonts will stay propportionally different in size if you've
originally set it up this way.
This feature is handy if you log into the same machine different
ways (directly, various X-Servers) and need to use different fonts
with different displays.
Each time you press one of these keys, the font will be de/increased
by 1. If you use a TrueType font on Win32, each such change becomes
immediately visible. On Win32 using Fixed Fonts or on X-Windows,
every font is usually not available in every size so it will take
multiple font sizing keystrokes to actually see a difference on
screen - i.e., You have to keep de/increasing font sizes until
'twander' finds one of the requested size in your font
installation. On X-Windows systems you may also see the font
type/face change as you do this ((because X-Windows does "closest
match" font substition).
A config file reload (^r) will reset everything back to your
"normal values".
- You can use the CMDSHELL option to define a string that will be
prepended to each manually entered command. The feature is off
by default. If enabled, it can be suppressed by entering "\"
as the first character in the manually entered command. This makes
it easy to create a default visual/GUI context for each command you
enter manually.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
twander 2.34:
Initial public release of program
tundra