RISCOS WinShell

!WinShell is an attempt to allow RISC OS users to create Wimp based Applications using a scripting language.

It is available to download from https://sourceforge.net/projects/riscoswinshell/

Or SVN via svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/riscoswinshell/code/ winshell-code

Initially the focus was on creating Wimp based applications exploiting command line programs.

I was working on the application at the time my Acorn Archimedies died in a house move some twenty years ago. With the new interest in RISC OS generated by Raspberry Pi I have decided to make it Open Source. I don’t intend to do more work on it as I now longer use RISC OS, but by making it Open Source I hope others will be interested enough to develop it or find it useful.

There is currently no documentation so one has to look at the script file in !grep and !WinShell to find out what script facilities there are.

!WinShell is just there to demo various script functions.

As an Open Source Application it really needs the following

1) Somebody to write up some documentation. not only of the script facilities, but also to use a template editors, sprite editor, !boot and !run files etc.

2) Develop some more applications that exploit the script approach

3) Develop the script facilities.

Let me know if you want access to the SourceForge wiki or other facilities to update

Thanks for reading Keith Sloan keith@sloan-home.co.uk

This is presumably aiming to become a more flexible alternative to the FrontEnd module and it’s Desc files (which is quite limited, I grant you)?

It might be worth taking a look at that as a possible project to work on before resurrecting a twenty year old alternative. For example, I always thought it’d be nice to be able to define your main window in a human-readable notation in the Desc file rather than having to resort to a template editor.

Lost touch with RISC OS a long while ago. But I thought FrontEnd was an alternative to template editor. WinShell does not try and replace template editor it is an attempt to allow one to build simple applications by just writing a script rather than having to do a fair amount of programming. It started life as a way of quickly making wimp front ends for command line programs like make, grep etc. You still need to use template editor to make the templates for it to use. I don’t use RISC OS any more so its offered up as is. If you want to rubbish it and says its not worth developing that up to you, but from your comments I don’t think you understand it. And yes it could be developed a lot more.

FrontEnd is for making FrontEnds for command line programs using a wimp template and a command script.

FrontEnd is for making FrontEnds for command line programs using a wimp template and a command script.

Or to put it in slightly different words: FrontEnd is a scripted Wimp interface to command line programs and I looked at WinShell and thought this is a scripted Wimp interface to command line programs like FrontEnd
Anyone know the earliest version of FrontEnd? This looks like similar thinking a number of years ago where one item made it into the public forum.

As Steve said it may be that studying both will produce something better than either.

WinShell was written in 1992, but never made it to the public as my Archimedes died.

Where is FrontEnd documented? I have Acorn C/C++ from RISC OS Open but FrontEnd documentation only describes modifications and extensions and is dated 2001.

Does FrontEnd support Drag & Drop/Load/Save etc

Its documented in the DDE/pdf in the documents that comes with AcornC/C++ chapter 16 (page 157). Most of the tools that come with AcornC/C++ use it.

Where is FrontEnd documented?

To an extent:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the.watsons/frontender/

Does FrontEnd support Drag & Drop/Load/Save etc

I think Armalyser at http://www.armclub.org.uk/free/ probably answers that.
You might like to try RPCEmu and a RO5 install to check comparisons, like I said earlier something better than either might come out of such comparison.

All words are said;-)
For a first impression, here are two of my very small frontends (grep and wget) . SDCreate use also the frontend-module.
Desc inside is the script.

Where is FrontEnd documented?

I posted a link to the location of the ReadMe in CVS in my initial post further up this thread. It’s not the complete docuementation, but should be read in conjunction with it.

When programming I much prefer to be able to just double click on a Makefile to run it, rather than having to drag it to an icon on the icon bar.

With a !Make application implemented in WinShell this easy to achieve I just code
#load.d14
%os dir %directory %stdin
%task amu
And on either double click or drag to icon bar it sets the current directory to where the Makefile is and then runs amu.

Is there a way to do this with the supplied !AMU which uses FrontEnd or is one stuck with having to drag Makefiles to the icon bar?

Thanks

You’ve confused me there. Makefiles are text files so double clicking opens it in an editor. So are you saying your program detects that the text files are make files and ‘amus’ them instead? Or do you mean that the makefile is filetyped in which case won’t setting a runtype do the job?

With frontend dropping an icon on on the iconbar is used to fill in one of the fields once you’ve done that you don’t have to drop the file on the icon bar every time – the field is already filled in.

My Makefile are set filetype Make i.e. hex d14. Setting a runtype does not solve the problem as the current directory needs to be set to where the makefile is. If I get it to run a BAT or Obeyfile then I don’t know of an easy way to stripe the directory from the full path name.
%directory %stdin does this in WinShell

If I drag a Makefile to !AMU and then subsequently just click on the make file !AMU as supplied just gives me an error message.

Colour me mystified.

If I “run” the Acorn C/C++ tools, double-clicking a Makefile runs the Make operation. I have to shift-double-click a Makefile to get it to open in a text editor.

There are 2 ways of working with make files. You can use either use amu or make. Make works with filetyped make files produced by the ‘project’ that you can run to compile. amu works with text makefiles. at some point make calls amu.

The above is a generalisation.

There seems to be some confusion. I see that !Make in the acorn tools uses a filetype of FE1, but !AMU does not seem to set a filetype. My Makefile are D14 not sure if this is historical. But if I set then to FE1 !Make does not like my Makefiles.

I think you will find that the Makefiles created by the Acorn !Make tool are peculiar to that app and are not the same as the makefiles understood by !AMU. I think !Make does a bit of translation before passing them to the amu tool.

I always used to use !Make for my projects, but now produce the ‘more traditional’ text makefiles manually and pass them to amu via an obey file.

the problem as the current directory needs to be set to where the makefile is

The RunType alias could be made to do this.

If I get it to run a BAT or Obeyfile then I don’t know of an easy way to stripe the directory from the full path name.

You don’t need to:

 dir %1.^

FrontEnd dates from Acorn C version 4, from 1991.

!Make outputs a peculiar format of makefiles, but they run just fine passing them directly to AMU. However, they’re quite horrid. !Make cannot load makefiles it didn’t create – best to ignore !Make, it’s barely more that a toy.

AMU itself is a standard ‘make’ program, although a very old one. I think if you double-click !AMU it’ll ‘claim’ FE1 makefiles so they’re run in !AMU by double clicking them, rather than !Make.

If you want a GUI for generating makefiles, try Sourcery.

There’s also the shared makefiles in the RISC OS build tree itself. See /castle/RiscOS/BuildSys/Makefiles – the DDE itself includes examples of how to use these to greatly simplify the makefile required for typical RISC OS components (applications, modules, utilities, etc.).

I’ll add the example programs from the DDE to the RISC OS Pi RC12 image (and probably just put them into the public CVS tree while I’m at it).