The “Daj Się Poznać 2016” (in polish: Get Noticed 2016) competition have finally come to an end. Multiple finalists shared their summaries before The Final Gala. I decided to do this after the event. This post summarises whole event in a short manner.

O The Console Kamil Dąbrowski #dajsiepoznac pic.twitter.com/ZfdKYjJpf5

— Maciej Aniserowicz💻 (@maniserowicz) June 18, 2016

In previous blogposts I discussed scripting custom REPLs for The Console. This time the custom will be just a good ol’ Unix shell called bash.

As I stated some time ago, I desired to have a scriptable Read-Eval-Print Loop in The Console. Now, as I made it, I’m going to briefly describe how to use it.

As nature of a programmer calls I need to express myself about Xtend. During development of The Console I have almost smashed my face a few times by gesture flying straight from internal cent****re of disbeliefs.

Argument completion should improve developer’s everyday life. Everywhere. That’s why I decided to have argument completion in The Console. To have the best thing - I want scriptable argument completion with already built-in filesystem paths completion.

Giving a few words about the process between hitting a TAB key and performing the magic.

The Console is an app which typical usecase fits within running a single instance. That’s by design. However, we sometimes forget to check whether some the app is waiting for us in the background and try to launch them. That’s when disaster happens. Two consoles placed on top of window and reacting to same hotkey? Cannot be!

Here’s a short story about preventing from having multiple instances of same app made in Java. There’s a note about communication, too.

JavaFX punched me in the face with a feature which I consider as a kind of general over-assumption and as a bug in The Console. When TextField is refocused through other event than click then it auto selects it’s whole content. I want my previous selection or caret position.

A workaround/hack/fix is introduced in this post. Oh, by the way, there’s a bug report.

The Console works on top of Java Nashorn API which brings in a whole JavaScript environment. On ng-conf 2016 I saw this slide from Brad Green talking about Angular 2 inside of Nashorn:

Just what a thought could come up to my mind?

When I use git VCS, I simply work in a shell. Even more complicated branching can be resolved using git show-branch  command. But this time I wanted to compare that again with gitk. Since I work on Windows I use babun which is based on Cygwin. And we know that Cygwin can actually launch gitk properly, right? Well, yes - when you configure it.

This time I present a filesystem  module which mimics the simplest cases of shell commands: ls, pwd, cd, cat. The module showcases module commands, scoping, Storage and onload/onunload events.

Last time on The Console:

Few things don’t make much sense, despite an attempt to press ahead without refactoring. Next post is going to treat about efforts on this little refactor.

… while those efforts were all about Class Diagrams! (pictures included)

The Console supports script prototyping which means you can edit a script and it will be automatically reloaded in The Console at the moment. But modules are different than single-file scripts. And this impacts script reloading, or rather module reloading.

Read on, GIFs included!

In previous posts (linked in the Summary) I discussed a topic of implementing modules in The Console. This time I’m going to describe my first step in this direction.

Currently The Console supports simple scripts - one .js file is one script, i.e. scripts/info/currency.js  is just a currency  command.

But that’s not enough. I want the modules, too. Here’s how I make them real.

The Console started as a small side project that was supposed to automatically perform things I do often manually. Checking exchange rates of currencies is one of amongst those repeated actions.

After a long research I’ve found a site that helps with compiling Xtend** **using Maven - http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/download.html - pretty straightforward, isn’t it? However, it lacks a few more things.

My goal was to compile and package Java 8 project together with JavaFX, written mostly in Xtend (in place of Java) with unpacked libraries into one Runnable JAR. In the end I’d like it to be compatible with e(fx)clipse IDE. Here’s how.

As I noticed in previous article about script management I’d like to support script sharing in The Console. This topic automatically brings idea of supporting Node.js modules. Nashorn doesn’t provide any kind of module import/export mechanism like CommonJS. However, it’s doable to provide custom require() and module.exports. But is it possible to really import Node.js modules or anything from npm?

Read-eval-print loop is quite useful kind of tool that simplifies both learning and trying some short code ideas. REPLs are always very specific - they can be used for evaluating programming language statements, some math calculation, database management, file processing and so on. In The Console I decided having all those things and even more - way to incorporate custom REPLs.

However, idea have grown much more than expected. In this post I explain what’s the big deal to talk about which shows why the development have currently slowed down.

The Console supports multiple tabs. By hitting CTRL+T  combination new tab is opened and auto-named. I decided to name tabs as “Tab 1”, “Tab 2”, etc. However, those tabs can be renamed and moved inbetween so auto-naming need an algorithm. I’ve done similiar operation few times but never done this specific things by using Lambda Expressions in Xtend. I was quite surprised by one small detail.

In The Console I primarily use JavaFX for UI. Nonetheless, due to problem with having undecorated taskbar-less always-on-top window I use JFrame from Java Swing to solve it. And here appears a new issue with Swing - how to regain once lost window focus in JFrame?

The biggest feature of my console software is ability to code own “commands” - scripts. It’s supposed to be easy and quick for programmers. I’m not trying to design my own DSL language or make users install some weird packages into system. JavaScript and console API is all you need to know to code your custom scripts.

If one of goals of The Console project is to make easy custom scripting then it’s logical that you need some way to manage your scripts. Putting all scripts in one file or even all scripts in one folder would be a mess. So, how to manage those files? How The Console deals with it?