WHAT'S NEW
twander 3.134 (3-11-2003):
===========================
BUG FIXES
- Fixed a problem which caused User-Defined Commands to be processed
with the CMDSHELL option when such commands were re-invoked via the
Command History. The program now properly applies CMDSHELL
processing (if enabled) *only* to manually entered commands.
- Previous version allowed FONTDECR to set font sizes to 0 or even
negative values. Feature is now checked to make sure a font size is
never decremented below 1.
CHANGES
- USETHREADS is now False by default. Thread implementations
vary so much from system to system it seemed smarter to
make their use a conscious decision.
- The default for REFRESHINT is now 5000 (up from 3000) which
should make the program work a bit more smoothly "out of the
box" on slower systems and X connections.
- The About box on the Help Menu now displays the 'twander'
web site information.
- Quite a bit of new material added to the GOTCHAS section of
the documentation.
- Boolean Options are now shown as "True" or "False" rather than
1 or 0 in the relevant Help Menu and Debug output.
- Nothing pre-selected now when entering a new directory. Previously,
the first item ("..") was always selected. This prevents accidental
navigation on slow/unresponsive systems or X-Windows connections
where you can type faster than the screen can update.
- The MAXDIR, MAXDIRBUF, MAXHIST, and MAXHISTBUF options have been
removed. These are replaced by the new MAXMENU and MAXMENUBUF
options which control the depth and display of *all* menus
with dynamic content.
- User-Defined Variables, Directory Shortcuts, and Command Definitions
can now be redefined within the same Configuration File. This was
done to better exploit the new conditional operators and the new
".include" directive in the configuration language. Now you
can maintain a "standard" configuration which everyone on the system
can ".include", but anything in that configuration can be redefined
locally with your own configuration statements.
- A blank Right Hand Side is now permitted for all Option Statements.
It means that the statement in question is simply ignored. This was
done to make Option Statements consistent with Directory Shortcut
and User-Defined Variable Statements, both of which allow a blank
RHS.
- Because the RHS of a String Option can now be blank, the ""
construct is no longer necessary to disable CMDSHELL. An entry in
the form 'CMDSHELL = ' will do.
VERY IMPORTANT: if for some reason you have a line like 'CMDSHELL =
""' in your Configuration File, remove it! Otherwise a pair of
double-quotes will be prepended to every RUNCMD you issue - almost
certainly not what you want.
- The "escape" character to escape (defeat) CMDSHELL processing has
been changed from \ to ". This was done for two reasons.
First, the backslash character may occasionally be necessary to
escape the first letter of a command string. More importantly, the
" is used to escape for the new Wildcard feature. CMDSHELL was
thus changed so both features which permit "escapes" would use the
same character for consistency.
- The Free Space and Total Space of each drive in Drive List View
are now shown in separate columns to make sorting order clearer.
- The FreeBSD port Makefile has been cleaned up and updated.
NEW FEATURES
- Wildcard-Based Selection
It is now possible to select items using a user-specified wildcard
with the SELWILD feature. (default: Control-\) This feature makes
the full power of Python regular expressions available for selecting
the items desired. You may enter any literal text *or any
legitimate Python regular expression* in the SELWILD dialog and all
lines with matching expressions will be selected. (Note that the
"wildcards" used here are *not* the same thing as the standard Unix
shell wildcard "globbing" used for naming files.) For example, if
you enter: \.exe all files or directories which have the string
".exe" somewhere on their display line will be selected. SELWILD
will never include ".." in any wildcard-based selection even if
that entry matches the regular expression.
By default, SELWILD will select an entry when your regular
expression matches *anything on the displayed line*. This allows
you to make selections based on any visible column of information.
Of course, if you have details turned off, the check for matching
will be done only against the file or directory name (since that's
all that is visible).
This "match anywhere on the line" semantic is possible because
SELWILD automatically massages the regular expression you provide to
make any match on the line true. There may be times when you want
to provide very specific regular expression definitions which seek a
match at specific locations. In that case, you can prevent SELWILD
from fiddling with your regular expression, by beginning it with the
" character. SELWILD understands this to mean that your regular
expression is to be treated literally without modification. (It only
throws away this leading " escape character.)
Because regular expressions can get complicated and tedious to type
in, any such expression you use is saved in a history available via
the Wildcard Menu. The menu can be invoked by clicking on its
button, pressing Alt-w, or Alt-Control-Right-Mouse-Button. (Note
that on Win32 you *must* press Alt then Control then
Right-Mouse-Button for this to work. Win32 appears to care deeply
about keystroke order.)
You can also preload that menu with commonly used wildcards by
placing multiple statements like this in your Configuration File:
WILDCARD = some-regular-expression
These will appear in the Wildcard Menu in the order they were
defined. Bear in mind that only the first MAXMENU number of items
will actually appear in the Wildcard Menu. Again, SELWILD will
check the first character of your regular expression and "escape" it
if that character is ".
There is a new debug bit which will display the Wildcard stack as it
changes.
- Advanced Sorting Options
You can now sort by any of the detail columns *whether or not
details are currently displayed*. Shift-F1 sorts by the leftmost
column, Shift-F2 sorts by the second from left column, and so forth.
Shift-F10 selects no sorting which means items will be displayed in
the order they are reported by the operating system. Shift-F11
reverses the sort order, and Shift-F12 toggles whether or not
directories and files should be separated when sorting and
displaying. These sort options are also available via a new Sort
Menu which can be opened by clicking on its menu button or pressing
Alt-s. There is no mouse shortcut for sorting options.
The current sort parameters are displayed on the Titlebar and
the name of the sort key field is automatically adjusted
depending on whether you are in Normal or Drive List View.
You can set your desired default sorting order via three new
options in the Configuration File.
Option Default Possible Values
---------------------------------------------
SORTBYFIELD Name No Sort, Permissions, Links,
Owner, Group, Length,
Time, Name
SORTREVERSE False True, False
SORTSEPARATE True True, False
- Conditional Processing Of Configuration File Statements
It is now possible to include or exclude statements in the
Configuration File based on certain conditions. This makes it easy
to maintain a single such file that works across all the different
operating systems and with many different users.
A Condition Block begins with a Condition Test Statement and ends
with '.endif'. If the Condition Test evaluates to be True, all the
lines up to the matching '.endif' are included in the configuration.
If False, all these lines are ignored. Conditionals may be nested
without limit. 'twander' keeps track of which '.endif' matches which
Condition Test Statement. Like all Configuration File entries,
whitespace is ignored when processing Conditional Statements and you
are free to indent (or not) as you see fit.
Condition Test Statements are one of three types:
#####
# Existential: True if FOO or $FOO are defined
#####
.if [FOO]
...
.endif
.if [$FOO]
...
.endif
#####
# Equality: True if FOO or $FOO are literally
# the same as the test-string
#####
.if [FOO] == test-string
...
.endif
.if [$FOO] == test-string
...
.endif
#####
# Inequality: True if FOO or $FOO are literally
# not the same as the test-string
#####
.if [FOO] != test-string
...
.endif
.if [$FOO] != test-string
...
.endif
Note that the test always depends first on a *variable reference*
([FOO], never just FOO), but that the Right Hand Side of
an in/equality test is just a string comparsion - no variable
expansion is done. This will not work as you might expect:
.if [FOO] == string[BAR]
To make it easy to create conditional blocks based on the type of
system you're running, 'twander' now automatically pre-defines two
variables which provide information about your system:
Variable Name Typical Values
--------------------------------
.OS nt, posix
.PLATFORM freebsd4, linux-i386, win32
Note that these predefined variables also begin with a period to
remind you of their intended role. They will thus also sort first in
the User-Defined Variables section of the Help Menu.
See the example .twander file provided in the distribution for
some extended examples of using conditinals in your Configuration
File.
- The New ".include" Directive
The configuration language now supports a means of including
other files in your configuration. This makes it easy to, say,
have a "standard" configuration that everyone can use as a starting
point like this:
.include /usr/local/etc/.twander.global
# Your configuration lines go here
You may have as many ".include" directives in your Configuration File
as you like. The only requirement is that there be whitespace between
the directive and the filename.
twander 3.0 (2-17-2003):
========================
- 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.
- A Quick Start introduction to 'twander' is now included in the
distribution. See 'READ-1ST.txt'.
- *MANY* bug fixes and code cleanup including a nasty one with
RH linux that prevented 'twander' from opening the user's
home directory.
- Most program features and options are now settable in the
configuration file AND you can set your default twander command line
arguments in an environment variable called TWANDER.
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.
- The -b, -f, -n, -w, -s, -x, -y command line options have
been removed because these options are not settable as
options in the configuration file.
- Width/Height now default to 800 and 600 pixels respectively.
Previous versions did not really count pixels correctly.
You can also specify the starting position on screen in pixels.
- 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.
- Various help menus have been added.
- Command History has been implemented and is available via a new
menu.
- There are now accelerator key and mouse shortcuts for each of the
menus.
- A new "Directory Shortcuts" feature has been added. You can
specify up to 12 directories which will be preloaded into
the Directory Menu (as if you'd already visited them) AND
you can move to each of them via one of the Function keys.
- twander debug facilities have been vastly improved. The -d
command line argument now takes a mandatory "debug level"
as an argument. This is a bitfield (which can be expressed
in either decimal or hex) in which each bit indicates a
kind of degbug output you'd like.
- There is a new Built-In variable called [YESNO:some text]. It
allows you to put a Yes/No popup during command execution.
If the user presses "No", the command is aborted.
- 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.
- 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.
b) The file/directory mode will be displayed showing Win32
attributes.
c) The Win32 user/group names will appear for each displayed
item, instead of "win32user" and "win32group".
- You can now resize fonts while running 'twander' without having to
change the respective configuration file parameters. Two new key
assignments have been defined to increment or decrement font size.
- 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.
- A new "Program Memory" feature is implemented which allows 'twander'
to maintain up to 12 separate, simultaneous clipboard- like
memories. These memories are used to compile names of files and
directories which you would like to subsequently processs. There
are 12 new corresponding Built-In Variables ([MEM1]-[MEM12]) which
allow command definitions to access the contents of the memories
- TundraWare Inc. is now running a 'twander-users' mailing list.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
twander 2.34 (12-23-2002):
===========================
Initial public release of program
tundra