$Id: WHATSNEW.txt,v 1.140 2004/03/11 08:43:39 tundra Exp $ WHAT'S NEW twander 3.XXX (3-XX-2004): =========================== BUG FIXES - In previous versions, a redefinition of a particular command key would cause old and new versions of the definition to appear in the Command Menu. This has been fixed. Now only the command defintion that is actually active (the last one that appears in the configuration file) appears in the Command Menu. - Entries in the Command Menu now appear strictly in the order of their definition in the configuration file. This was not always the case in previous releases. - Help and Debug output is now consistently sorted. NEW FEATURES - The RUNCMD feature (default: Control-z) gives you to enter commands "on-the-fly". It has always been possible to make reference to built-in, user-defined, and environment variables (via the "[vblname]" mechanism) when entering commands manually. The most common use of this feature is to include a reference to the current directory or item(s) selected in the GUI as a part of the manual command. For instance entering: less [DSELECTIONS] will let you page through all the files you currently have selected. Since this is used fairly often, "shortcut" forms for many of the builtins have been implemented. You can enter either the full variable name reference or its shortcut when using RUNCMD. This is ***only*** for RUNCMD. Configuration files still require the full name to be used. This was an intentional design choice to keep the configurations consistent and readable. Here are the new shortcuts you can use in RUNCMD: [D] for [DIR] [DN] for [DSELECTION] [DS] for [DSELECTIONS] [SN] for [SELECTION] [SS] for [SELECTIONS] [1] for [MEM1] [2] for [MEM2] [3] for [MEM3] [4] for [MEM4] [5] for [MEM5] [6] for [MEM6] [7] for [MEM7] [8] for [MEM8] [9] for [MEM9] [10] for [MEM10] [11] for [MEM11] [12] for [MEM12] - The TOGAUTO Key (Default: Control-o) has been added to allow you to toggle Autorefreshing on- and off. When working with very large/slow directory reads, it is handly to temporarily turn off refreshing (and do it manually as needed with the Refresh - Default: Control-l) key. This is simpler than changing and reloading the configuration file each time you want Autorefreshing disabled. - The current state of Autofreshing is now displayed on the main window title bar. - You can now force a display refresh after a command is executed by placing the REFRESHAFTER symbol (default: '+') at the beginning of your command string in the configuration file. This also works when entered manually via RUNCMD (default: Control-z). This will take place regardless the current AUTOREFRESH setting. - A new user-settable option variable, AFTERWAIT (default: 1) has been added. This tells 'twander' how long to wait before initiating a display refresh requested by the REFRESHAFTER construct. This gives the system AFTERWAIT seconds to complete the command before a display update is done. See documentation for subtleties of using this feature. - During actual refreshing - whether automatic, manual, because of a directory change, or because of a REFRESHAFTER demand - the Autorefresh state on the title bar has "*" appended to it. Ordinarily, this happens so fast you do not see it. But on really long refreshes, the asterisk is a visual confirmation that the program is busy and not hung. CHANGES - The title bar no longer has a separate entry to indicate reverse sorts. Instead, when sorting is reversed, the field name being used as the sort key has a '-' appended to it. This was done to make the title bar less cluttered and of reasonable length. - The directory path displayed on the title bar is now limited to 60 characters. Paths longer than this are truncated to the last 60 characters and "..." is prepended to the result to indicate that a partial path is being displayed. This was done because some systems, notably Win32, have very long path names. Moving to these directories caused the other status information to the right on the title bar to be lost. twander 3.135 (3-11-2003): =========================== BUG FIXES - Found (and fixed) last-minute bug which caused [DESELECTION] and [SELECTION] to be returned incorrectly when nothing was selected in the UI. 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