INLS 183
Distributed systems & analysis
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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.
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.

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.
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.

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'




   


  If you have any questions or issues, you can contact me at MCarroll at email.unc.edu.