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> Project 6 • Introduction • Narrative
• Instructions • Functionality
• Extras •
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Introduction
This week's installation ended up being AH-TTY: A Helpful Terminal
Emulator. Essentially what this light shell does is offer aid when
a user attempts to type in a command by offering first the available
commands that fall under the letters a user types and then the available
arguments of a command once a complete command has been typed in.
This terminal emulator caught my eye because as a Unix newbie I often
find myself wondering about what arguments I can use with a command,
and I tire of having to constantly check man pages for that one argument.
AH-TTY provides the arguments as one types, saving time and effort. |
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Narrative
I had to "fall back" on this install as my other ongoing
projects are taking longer to figure out than I anticipated, but this
is actually a good thing because I wanted to get this done too. Now
that I have it, it is really cool and I wish I installed it sooner!
I found this shell emulator software while cruising around FreshMeat.org
looking for cool stuff. I was looking primarily for console apps and
this one caught my eye. This week I finally installed it.
After downloading the source file from FreshMeat.org at this URL
using wget, I unzipped
and read the Readme and Install files. Everything was very
straightforward and I only had to run the following three commands:
configure, make and make install.
Next, I fired up the shell by typing 'ah-tty'. My terminal window
changed slightly and I got a menu list of sorts at the bottom of my
terminal window. When I typed, the menu list would change according
to the characters at the command line.
Next I tried switching to the z-shell and activating ah-tty again.
No problems there either, but now I had two menu lists at the bottom
of my screen. Now I was thinking that apparently you have to exit
the ah-tty shell before switching to another shell and using ah-tty
or they menu lists will keep piling up. I tried again and everything
worked fine. AH-TTY actually put me back in the bash shell from z
though. When I exited I was back in z.
After I knew the shell worked I tried out some commands. Everything
worked fine, although I did notice that the menu list does not provide
help for all commands. Every time I typed an 'a', nothing would appear
in the menu list, so I could not find the'alias' command for example.
Now, I wanted to make an alias for ah-tty. When I used the command
'alias ah='ah-tty'', it seemed to work at first, but when I tried
the alias on another terminal it didn't work. It seemed that aliases
were only stored on each terminal, since I could set them independently
but the aliases did not appear between them.
When I tried logging out and back in, the aliases would be gone as
well. After doing a brief check in a book, I realized that to have
a permanent alias I would need a shell script to load such things.
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Instructions
for use
Instructions for using AH-TTY are very straight forward. All a user
has to do is type 'ah-tty' and the shell will run over the existing
shell ( I tried bash and z). To quit, just type 'exit'. All the while
you are using the shell, it will provide helpful information at the
bottom of the terminal window.
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Functionality
I found the AH-TTY shell to work very well. Since it responds to what
I type, I expected some ort of delay, but responses were always immediate.
The one issue I found was that with certain letters that had many
command opportunities, like 'c', not all the available options would
be presented. This seems to be due to the limited real estate that
AH-TTY takes up, as it limits itself to three lines in the terminal.
Another issue I ran into was that on some occasions the helper menu
would not reset after a command was issued. This led to a problem
where another command would need to be run before the helping menu
would "syncronize" again. All in all, it is a pretty cool
add on to the terminal and can help a lot when adding arguments to
commands. |
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Files
and Baubles
• The script file
• Screen capture after starting
the shell
• Typing in 'ls'
• Typing in 'c'
• Logging out of Z and typing
'w'
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