At 5:59 PM -0700 8/18/01, Nathaniel Irons wrote:
>I'm writing some shell utilities that will see a lot of punishment, and
>would benefit greatly from some common UI idioms. Specifically, I'd
>like to know how to perform:
Some poorly thought out guesses follow.
>* keyword completion - tab-expanding a term from a known set,
> ideally with some facility for partial completion and
> presentation of remaining options
Keep a buffer of characters typed after the last whitespace. on
tab-key, use buffer as key to hash of hashes. Do the right thing if
you get back a single entry or a hash. Load the hash at script
initialization with something like Data::Dumper. (In other words,
write a separate script to build the hash for you and save it in a
meaningful way).
>* in-place progress indicators - the ability to count from 1%
> to 100%, without occupying more than one line of the buffer
Probably you have to play around with things under the Term:: hierarchy.
>* external-editor handoffs, whereby my code can call $EDITOR,
> wait for it to exit, and then pick up the file from /tmp, or
> wherever.
Umm. system, fork, exec, backticks....
>
>I can call external widgets if necessary, but system and shell
>portability would be swell, as I'm developing with tcsh/Mac OS X and
>deploying with bash under FreeBSD. I've been poking through CPAN and
>various O'Reilly titles, but either the topic is too cozy a niche, or
>I'm not going about the search properly.
>
>Any suggestions or pointers would be appreciated.
There are no pointers in perl, and even 'The More than One True Way
to Do it In Perl' is just a suggestion... ;-)
Hope this helps in any small way.
-Jeff Lowrey
