This Old Workbench Episode Ten

Hodgepodge and Miscellanea

First of all, I owe a big apology to anyone who has written (e-mail or otherwise) over the past few months. I've been inexcusably remiss in my duties as host of This Old Workbench, but hopefully, I will catch back up.

The Tooling of the Shells

Now then, on with the show. Last episode I covered some highly useful system tools. This time around, let's have a look and the Amiga's shell. When the Amiga first shipped, it (like the Mac, and unlike most PCs) had a very sophisticated GUI (yes, I know, you newcomers look down your nose and poke fun at the ol' orange and blue look of the pre-2.0 WB, but trust me, even the pre- 1.2 WB was in a class by itself in 1985.) Unlike the Mac, the Amiga also had a command line interpreter, rather like DOS and UNIX. While the early CLI was somewhat limited, the release of version 1.3 of the OS gave the CLI quite a boost, with the introduction of the shell.

The shell offered many powerful improvements over the CLI. Probably one of the most useful features was the ability to make many commands resident. This meant the command was loaded into memory, and could thus be used without having to insert the Workbench disk (this was back when relatively few Amiga's had hard drives.) Another excellent feature was a command history. This allows the user to recall earlier commands, without having to retype them, truly a time saver.

Well, the shell was quite a step up from the older CLI, but still, Amiga programmers, being an inventive (and demanding) lot, have over the course of time, wrought many improvement (and replacements) for the Amiga's trusty shell.

VinceED, Shell Enhancement/Editor

Figure 1: VincED Shell Settings

Vinced is a full screen windowhandler for the console handler, and CON: and RAW:, written in 100% assembly language. Remember the old C64? Well, I still have warm toasty remembrances on the the good ol' 8-bit days, and Vinced brings back one of my favorite features, the full screen editor. You can move the cursor anywhere in the shell window, to a command which has scrolled up, for instance, and press return to execute it. Vinced also has the best features from the Amiga's line oriented shell such as a command history, and it's own bag of tricks.

Have it your way

Vinced is highly configurable, and comes with a simple and easy to use GUI to manage all of its options. As you can see from Figure 1, the Vinced preferences allows you control of numerous options, including Vinced's macros, buttons, shell features and more.

Figure 2: VincED Shell Macros

Figure 3: VincED Shell

Figure 2 & 3 shows a typical Vinced shell windows. While it may look rather plain to the shell shocked, long time CLI devotees will appreciate the buttons in the title bar, as well as the horizontal and vertical scroll bars. The small 'dot' button iconifies the window, the Help button calls up the AmigaGuide help file, and the Settings calls up the Preferences program. You can also see the menu functions Vinced adds to the screen.

Of course, in addition to the ease of use features like menus, scroll bars, and on-line help, Vinced offers the power user numerous goodies as well. One very nice feature is command expansion via the tab key. Type in the first few letters of your command, and hit the Tab key, and Vinced tries valiantly to guess the rest. This is mainly good for typing in long path names. If Vinced can't distinguish between several choices, a requester pops up allowing you to click on the desired choice.

Vinced also offers improved clipboard support, icon drop (drop a drawer icon, and Vinced will type in the path for you), and a flexible Macro system, and a lot more.

Whether you are a long time shell wizard, or just use the shell for occasional tasks, Vinced is a definite must have.

Put a little Magic in your File Requester

Figure 4: Magic File Requester

I've covered several file requester replacements in past episodes, but MFR is easily the "prettiest" of the bunch. MFR offers all the standard improvements, including the "display directories first" option I'm partial to. MFR also offers some features the other file requesters don't, and well as an interesting and effective display layout. See figure 4 for MFR in action.

If you've ever used an early version of ASDG's Art Department Pro, you'll find MFR a somewhat familiar, though highly evolved experience.

Save our CED

If you want to use CygnusED Pro with MFR, you should download MFRHelp.

MFRHELP
Daniel Weber
Public Domain
Aminet: mfrhelp.lha util/boot 4K+MagicFileRequester2.0<->CygnusEd3.5 fix

This fixes a problem when loading a single file in Cygnus Ed with MFR. Unfortunately, I've had several other programs misbehave with MFR, most notably Visage, a picture viewer. For some reason, when selecting a picture to view using the MFR file requester, Visage tries to display every file in the directory, even if you select just one picture.

As always, your milage may vary. Like all Workbench retrofits, a little care (and a lot of testing) exercised when installing new programs can save you much grief later on.

McFiler Update
McFiler Disk Cataloger
Roberto Bizzarri
Aminet: McF44b.lha biz/dbase 130K+*McFiler* catalogues files w/ many usefu

In the May 1997 issue of Amazing Computing, I covered McFiler, a very useful disk cataloging tool. Well, since then, the author has released version 44b, which fixes the bug I mentioned concerning corrupting the catalog when updating a disk. If you need to get your disks organized, look no further.

Shell we call it a day?

Well, that's about it for this issue.

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