[ANNOUNCE] hg "shell" extension

[Steve Borho]

On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 18:14 +0000, Mark Williamson wrote:
> > > I'm not aware of anything like this having been done before but maybe I
> > > just missed it.  For some reason I've decided it'd be "fun" to dive into
> > > playing with Python's readline interface and hacked up a prototype
> > > interactive Hg shell.
> > >
> > > The attached patch is a snapshot of how far I've gotten.  It applies with
> > > -p0 and adds a file "shell.py" to the hgext directory.  There are no
> > > other changes to the hg source.
> > >
> > > The "shell" extension implements an interactive commandline for hg,
> > > supporting editting, history and tab completion on command names, command
> > > options and global opions.  It should work on Unix systems, but I believe
> > > not on Windows (which lacks a Python readline module, apparently).
> > >
> > > The tab completion isn't yet as intelligent as it could be, since it
> > > doesn't understand which options should also have arguments and it's not
> > > able to complete filenames or revision IDs.  I'll hope to add these
> > > features in a future release
> >
> > The zsh completion script has pretty comprehensive context-sensitive
> > tab completion. I think the bash one is also pretty good, though I
> > haven't used it. Given that, the shell extension is probably best
> > suited for windows (or csh users and other inhabitants of purgatory).
> 
> Thanks for the info!
> 
> I'll give those completion scripts a playing with...  I would hope that a true 
> hg extension for shell-like behaviour ought to be able to perform better than 
> an external shell completion script and offer more-cunning behaviours, but I 
> could be wrong here.
> 
> This is quite fun stuff to play with though, so I'll be working on it 
> regardless (and I need it for pmpu future developments).
> 
> My current development code has much better context-sensitive intelligence, 
> things are coming along nice and quickly.

It would definitely be a boon to be able to embed an hg-shell into
TortoiseHg.  Any chance you could get it to work with this package?

http://newcenturycomputers.net/projects/readline.html

-- 
Steve Borho (steve at borho.org)
http://www.borho.org/~steve/steve.asc
Key fingerprint = 2D08 E7CF B624 624C DE1F  E2E4 B0C2 5292 F2C6 2C8C