This Episode I'm going to cover a new version of a nifty shell enhancement for the Amiga, called VincEd. The Amiga has always had, in addition to its GUI, a command line interface, or CLI. Meant for more experienced users, the CLI affords the adventurous user much additional power. While the arcane commands used by the CLI can be hard to remember and use, often it is faster and more efficient than using a graphical interface.
With OS 1.3, Commodore introduced the Amiga Shell, an enhancement to the earlier CLI. This shell added a command line history and a few other upgrades. There have also been a number of third party CLI enhancements, such as ConMan and KingCON. VincED, by Thomas Richter, offers a great many enhancements, but goes much further than your average CLI spruce up. VincED is available on Aminet:
VincED is a full screen editor masquerading as a shell. If you've ever used a Commodore 64, you'll remember how useful this is. After typing a series of commands, you can just move the cursor up to the previously typed command, press enter, and the command is run again. Of course, VincED adds scroll bars (both vertical and horizontal) to access items which have scrolled off the current screen. VincED keeps a configurable amount of shell's contents in memory, and this can even be saved and reloaded.
Figure 2: VincEd Prefs Macro Section
VincED also has a full featured command line history, which calls up previous commands at a keystroke. In Addition, VincEd offers powerful TAB Command expansion. This is useful for typing very long complicated path or filenames; just type in some characters from the filename, and VincED can complete the typing for you, if the filename is unique, present you with a list of possible candidates to select, or even give you a file requester for you to select the file. Up to 6 keys can be configured for this purpose.
Figure 3: VincEd Prefs Shell Section
Also available to help save typing are Macros and Buttons. These are short keyboard sequences invoked either by a keystroke, a gadget in the Window Title, or a menu. Oh, did I mention VincED also can give your shell a menu?
Figure 4: VincEd Prefs Window Section
Another cool feature is CTRL-Z, which launches a new shell window, even if the current shell is blocked (for instance, if you forgot to type run.)
VincED has many features, like VT220 compatibility mode, support for graphics cards, fully configurable control keys, a graphical preferences program and a lot more. If you use the Amiga's shell at all, I highly recommend this program.
