My use case:
I kick-off a Python script from a button within Excel to do some data aggregation. The setup currently works nicely, but I would like:
Cmd to never accidentally pause - it's a known feature of the command prompt to pause on any text selection: Avoid pausing tasks when select something on PowerShell and Command Prompt
To let the cmd prompt look more like a pop-up
I have noticed NSIS installers outputs it's commands in a little logging box:
Question:
I would like to know if there are any programs out there that does most of what I want already. E.g. something like RunLikePopup.exe c:\path\to\script.bat, with output like:
Not sure what you are really after. I 'll give it a try.
In case you build an application as 'console'-only than that results in a 'command-line-interface [CLI]' Look-and-feel. Plane and simple. The output of a NSIS script (.nsi file) can not be paused as it is simply the output of the compiler executing the script code. 'Pausing' that would instantly mean pausing the compiler to do its work. I see no reason why you would want that.
Example Unix 'more' command (sending text oriented content to stdout. CLI...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_(command)
In case you need to 'catch' the output from the NSIS compiler here is what you need to do:
run NSIS from (Windows) CLI:
makensis [ option | script.nsi | - ] [...] > compiler_log.txt
What you appear to want is typically named 'output redirect'. (https://ss64.com/nt/syntax-redirection.html). In case you need to 'catch' the outpout from a NSIS script at compile time, please use NSIS ' CLI and redirect the (compilers) output to any text file (e.g. compiler_output.txt)
PS. In order to ensure receiving good quality answers, try to be as specific as you can in your questions.
I have written a Freeware editor ME "Martins Editor" where you can send text via inpipe:
[C:\]dir /s | me in
"in" always shows the first page (does not scroll), "ins" scrolls and "inp" scrolls page by page. In this context, "me in" is a substitute for "more".
Then you will see the output in the editor. ME is a simple editor with the focus on multiplatform text (different EOL encodings, codepages). It has additional Wordstar ("IDE classic") key setting and HTML/XML highlightning. It is available for Windows, OS/2, Linux and MacOS.
http://www.hypermake.com/english/betatest.html#hd117
The 2016 version is still current. In the next weeks, I publish a new version.
I am working on a cmd.exe window replacement (commandline frontend) "MeShell" based on ME with look-and-feel of a normal commandline window. Because on the lack of a modern comfortable commandline window on the old OS/2 platform which is still alive (http://www.arcanoae.com), I will publish an OS/2 version first. If this version works fine, I will publish a Windows version later. In the context of MeShell, I improve the inpipe functionality of ME which is still buggy and does not support colors in the 2016 version.
Is it possible to read what's currently displayed on the windows terminal pragmatically using any available API?
For example, I've got an app that tail's some log files. I'd like to be able to hit a key and open a text editor at the line that is currently being viewed. The problem is the terminal also has scroll bars.
Not easy. Perhaps you could capture the screen and use OCR to identify its contents, or make a shortcut to some sort of macro that selects all the screen and copies the text. But there is no API available to perform the task you ask.
Of course, you can tee the command you're running in the console to a file, and open such file with an editor whenever you like, however it will show the full output of the command and not the visible part. If you like more information on that topic, it is answered in SO - Displaying Windows command prompt output and redirecting it to a file
.
I got curious if it is possible to have multiple tabs open in a browser where all the tabs have identical content and be able to press a key or a mouseclick so that all tabs experience the same input. I believe my formulation of what I want to do may be confusing as searching this with my words has been fruitless. I will therefore illustrate with something specific:
In my case I want to have a few tabs on same window with the Google search present in all tabs. With one of the tabs selected as the current view in the browser.
I would then type in a query and click the first available link. My desired output would have all the tabs experience the query search and link click at the same time.
I would like to achieve this through bash scripting [not sure if this IS possible] and would be very grateful if I am provided with some examples and readings I can look at to get started on my example detailed above. If there are other approaches I would be happy to look at them as well. Preferably it would be something I could code and play around with.
I found a similar question here, but the question was not answered as it appears a little too general.
If it helps determine the answer: I am running Firefox 43 on Ubuntu 15.04.
Apologies in advance if the question appears a little vague. I will be more than happy to provide requested clarifications.
You can send keyboard and mouse inputs to windows via the X server (which is the service which controls all graphical windows).
For example you can send an F5 keypress to a Chrome window using the following
CHROME_WINDOW_ID="$(xdotool search --class Chrome | head -n 1)"
xdotool key --window "$CHROME_WINDOW_ID" F5
You can use mouse_move and click similarly; see xdotool for more details.
I'm not sure you could do this to individual browser tabs (unless you get your script to click on the correct tab beforehand), but definitely for individual browser windows.
You might do something like this:
# Write all Chrome window IDs to array
xdotool search --class Chrome | tr '\n' ' ' | read -a WINDOW_IDS
for WINDOW in ${WINDOW_IDS[#]} ; do
# Do actions on $WINDOW
done
Edit:
If your problem is specifically related to manipulating web pages, you might also want to check out browser automation tools such as Selenium, mechanize, or splinter.
The teacher never explained us anything about unix and bash. He told us something about the history. Then he said how to fill in an IP address in a program called putty, which is the shell we used to work on the server. He basically gave us 7 series of exercises. We also had a book that was pretty useless. I mostly used internet and SO to help myself out, along with the commands I knew from DOS and the man/info pages.
The question is, what is the preferred text editor to make scripts? Internet says any will do but I know only cat. And then, how do I even begin? What I need is a crash course or something. I'm sorry I know this isn't the best kind of question to ask here but it's all I can think of atm. Don't blame me, but please do bash the teacher (pun intended).
Try using vi as your text editor. Change to the directory you want your script to be saved in and then type in `vi myScript.sh". This will start the vi text editor. You can type in all your shell commands here.
Here's a link to a vi cheat sheet - http://linuxfordummies.org/tag/vi/
Once your in vi, you can type in one command on each line, you can use enter to move to the next line. After you have your script typed in, press : on the keyboard to open a prompt for vi. Once you have the : (colon) prompt at the bottom of the screen, enter wq for write/quit. This will save myScript.sh to the directory you started in. You should then be able to execute the script just by calling myScript.sh
I hope this helps, best of luck!
You could use the vi text editor, but it can be a bit tricky if you're starting out. I would try gedit if your using a GNOME environment
or "How do I answer questions on SO in Firefox using gVim inside the textboxes?"
It's All Text!
From the extension page:
At the bottom right corner of any edit
box, a little edit button will appear.
Click it. If this is the first time
you've used "It's All Text!" then you
will be asked to set your preferences,
most importantly the editor.
The web page will pop up in your
selected editor. When you save it,
it'll refresh in the web page. Wait
for the magic yellow glow that means
that the radiation has taken effect!
Vimperator makes Firefox act very much like VIM:
Vimperator is a free browser add-on for Firefox, which makes it look and behave like the Vim text editor. It has similar key bindings, and you could call it a modal web browser, as key bindings differ according to which mode you are in.
Once you have the cursor in a text box, hit Ctrl-I to open in your editor, which defaults to gvim.
The current answers don't work anymore now that Mozilla removed XUL in favour of WebExtensions. With recent firefox versions, there are the following options (sorted in descending order by the current popularity on addons.mozilla.org).
GhostText provides instant synchronization between editor and textbox via editor-specific plugins. The project is on github and the vim extension is written in Tcl.
withExEditor is cross-platform but requires a native application written in node.js. In addition to editing text fields it also allows viewing the source of the page, MathML, SVG and the current selection. The project on github and the native node.js application
Textern requires a (currently) Linux-only native application written in Python. Synchronizes the content of the text field while you type in the editor. The extension and the native app can be found on github
Tridactyl is probably what you're looking for nowadays.
It's the spiritual successor to the likes of Pentadactyl and Vimperator, which are not available for the current version of Firefox.
If you want something more like It's All Text, where the editing area appears right on top of the browser text area rather than launching an editor window, and you're willing to use Neovim, check out firenvim.
It's All Text! will let you use whatever editor you want. To use vim with it, you'll need a small shell script to open it in a terminal:
#!/bin/sh
exec xterm -e /usr/bin/vim "$#"
If you have GVim, you won't need the shell, script, obviously.
ViewSourceWith is another addon worth lookng at. It supports more than just edit boxes and text. For example, you can configure it to open images in the GIMP.
Another feature that I find useful is that it can pop-up a dialog box that shows all the js and css scripts used on the page. You can then choose to view/edit file in your preferred editor.
For answering questions on SO, you may also want to get the Vim Markdown Syntax file
The "It's all Text" extension, perhaps?
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125
If you use vimperator and have the markdown syntax file installed, a useful line for your .vimperatorrc is:
au LocationChange .* :set editor="gvim -f"
au LocationChange stackoverflow\.com :set editor="gvim -f -c 'set ft=mkd'"
This will tell vim to do syntax highlighting for markdown when you are on stackoverflow.com, but not when you are any other site. There are similar hacks for wikipedia/mediawiki etc. Enjoy :)
One way to do this is to use the vimperator extension - of course, that does a lot more than what you're looking for.
At the time of writing it is experimental, but the jV extension looks good. To quote from the page:
This extension makes all html textareas into a very stripped-down version of Vi[m]. It's modal, supports infinite undo, has register support, search, visual mode, and various movement and editing commands.
When using Vimperator in Windows (I am using Vista) you may need to double-escape the path to gvim.exe to use it as the external editor. Single escaping did not work for me as Vimperator unescapes it twice. Eg:
:set editor="C:\\\\Program\\ Files\\ (x86)\\\\Vim\\\\vim72\\\\gvim.exe" -f
Then while in a text box you use Ctrl+I and it will open gvim for editing. When you save and exit it will update the text box.
There is an experimental way to directly embed the real vim in firefox using embedded editor - though it requires mozplugger and will only work on Linux.
Try out the wasavi extension. You might want to check out the all versions page to make sure you try out the latest version. (Copy of this answer.)
You can also use the ViewSourceWith addon to achieve the same. Just right-click on any text input and you can edit it using Vim.
As said by others,
as a Vi/(g)Vim user you'll probably want to look at the Vimperator addon, which also provides the what you ask:
inside a textbox, hit <C-i> to launch the external editor.
(can be defined in _vimperatorrc: set editor=gvim -f )
A hint for Mac users: if you want to use "It's all text" with vim, the easiest way is to use http://code.google.com/p/macvim/ . Point "It's all text" to the mvim script that's provided along with the .app (you can place this script anywhere, I choose /usr/bin/ so that I can load mvim from the command line)
Pterosaur is a Firefox plugin that allows you to use Vim in all input fields. It uses an actual Vim process in the background so it has all the functionality you expect, including reading your .vimrc configuration and your plugins.
With Firefox-57 on Linux, I installed textern https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textern/, and found it to be a suitable replacement for ViewSourceWith for editing text boxes.