I am writing a command line application in Ruby using GLI. My app uses the Bio gem to query PubMed and print out bibliographic information for the results, one by one, to the terminal. The user is prompted for a small amount of information using HighLine, this is recorded to a database, and the display cycle repeats. Here is example output:
I would like to create a frame around my application as it runs to show the key bindings for exit, help commands etc. The text editor nano provides an example:
How can I create a similar frame around my program output, while allowing scrolling within that frame? Is there a cross-platform way to do this? I'd like to handle both Windows and *nix.
Related
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
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I'm working on a unique project using terminal/Shell but I've hit a little bit of a roadblock I haven't been able to work around.
I want to be able to read the content of the location of the cursor.
For example, if the cursor is currently located on line 2, column 5 which contains an E, I want to be able to read that E and create a variable with it.
Can you explain what your project entails? It might help if we knew what you're trying to accomplish.
No tools exist to do this in the shell, as far as I know. To actually read a remote screen would require this as a feature of the remote terminal (or emulator).
Neither do any compiled language support this. All applications that appear to do this fake it by keeping an internal copy of what they assume is displayed on the screen.
Lookup the curses* library for more information. This toolkit allows a programmer to address the screen as a random accessible grid, and hides all of the updates to the actual terminal screen.
See also: ncurses
I want to create an application on a Mac to convert multiple files (txt, pdf, doc, html, etc) to a single pdf file that can be printed. The real point is that if you have 50 texts you don't have to open every single file and click command-p.
I'm not quite sure whether the best way to do this is by creating a full-fledged app or an automator plugin (or something else). If I remember correctly there's a filter in mac os's terminal that can convert files to pdf (but I forgot what it's called).
So would an automator plugin do this well, or shall I make an app for this? Can you provide me advantages for each answer?
I've done cocoa touch programming before so I can write objective-c quite well.
Use appscript, either as an action in an automator script or standalone. The advantage is that it is very simple and will take you a fraction of the time to write an app.
Here is something very close to what you want. It sets up a drop-folder and each file dragged onto it is printed (you can use multiple-select to get what you want). It uses Apple Works 6 which doesn't support the file-types that you want.
To modify it to use the Preview application instead you need to change the tell command in the script and then google the dictionary for Preview to check which verb to use for printing.
I have written some GTK programs using the gtkD bindings for the D programming language that are otherwise console apps, but are capable of displaying plots on the screen and saving them to a file. I'd like to run these on a machine that I only have console-based SSH access to, which means that the plots wouldn't be displayed on the screen, but would still be written to files.
When I call Main.init(), I get a Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display, as expected. When I call Main.initCheck() instead and ignore the errors, I simply get more errors later in execution related to the lack of a screen.
Is there some easy way to make my program ignore the fact that there's no screen available, do all its on-screen drawing to some dummy device (the graphics equivalent of /dev/null) and still actually draw to Pixmaps and Pixbufs (necessary for saving plots to files) and run the non-GUI-based parts of the app?
Edits: In cases where the app launches a window and blocks on an event loop, the ideal thing to do would be to close the window immediately (or not succeed in opening it in the first place) and continue running the non-GUI based parts of the program. If this is impossible I can work around it by making sure I don't launch any windows.
Also, it appears that Pixbufs and Pixmaps don't work without a screen present. I tried drawing to a Pixmap, creating a Pixbuf out of that, and saving the results to a file, either after calling Main.checkInit() and ignoring the errors or without an init statement and either way GTK complains about lack of a screen.
I believe the simplest solution is to use only GdkPixbufs for processing your plots; as far as I know, the gdk-pixbuf library only deals with pixbufs in memory and doesn't need a window system. Keep the processing and display parts of your code strictly separated. If you do that, it shouldn't matter that there is no screen. You could even make a command-line option to disable drawing to the screen.
You could also use GtkOffscreenWindow but this has only been available since GTK 2.20 and as far as I can tell the D bindings only cover up to 2.18.
Alternatively, you could use X forwarding in your SSH session; use -X or -Y on your SSH command line. See your SSH manual for more information. If you are running an X server on the machine you are SSH'ing from, then the plots can be displayed on your local machine's screen.
Pixmaps won't work without server - they are, by definition (in X terminology), image resources stored on X server. Pixbufs, however, are stored in client application, and they should work without X.
If you need Pixmaps but don't want to graphics, you have two choices:
Enable SSH X tunneling by passing -X flag. In this case, your app will be able to use local X server.
Use Xvfb - it's dummy X server that does no output at all, and all graphics are stored in memory.
I wanted to have a GUI front-end for a script that accepts numerous command-line options, most of them are UNIX paths. So I thought rather than typing them in (even with auto-completion) every time, I'd create a GUI front end which contains text boxes with buttons beside them, which when clicked will invoke the file browser dialogue. Later, I thought I'd extend this to other scripts which would sure require a different set of GUI elements. This made me think if there's any existing app that would let me create a GUI dialog, after parsing some kind of description of the items that I want that window should contain.
I know of programs like Zenity, but I think it's doesn't give me what I want. For example, if I were to use it for the first script, it'll end up flashing sequence of windows in succession rather than getting everything done from a single window.
So, basically I'm looking at some corss-platform program that lets me create a window from a text description, probably XML or the like. Please suggest.
Thanks
Jeenu
Mozilla's XUL is a cross platform application framework - . You could write an app as a Firefox plugin or a standalone XUL application.
mono and monodevelop could work for this. Or even something super simple like shoes.