fpm shell

[amitu]

fpm shell
>> -- ftd.text: hello world

This starts a server and opens it in browser.

In browser Edit Mode

Since user will be mostly interacting with the UI in browser, the shell can also be used from browser.

Pressing Shift-Shift launches the shell in the last hand side in the browser. The preview is in the right hand side.

special commands

FTD lines start with -- . Special commands start without -- .

clear

Clears the browser, all rendered UI is cleared. All memory still remains. If some event handler was not bound to UI (say a timer), it may persist.

reset

Clears the UI and the variables etc. As if we started the session from scratch.

open

If you have closed the browser window/tab this command will open it again.

print

This will print the value of the variable if <name> is a variable. For record, component etc it will print information about them.

write

This will whiteout the shell in a file.

Any content cleared using clear or reset will not be written in the file.

read

This will read a file in memory.

Continuation

For most commands eg -- ftd.text: foo more lines may be expected, so we show partially rendered content in browser, but keep the user in "continuation mode":

fpm shell
>> -- ftd.text: hello
.. 

Notice the two dots, this indicates we are in the continuation mode. If we have to provide more values, we will provide here, else we can press enter to "finish" the section.

Auto Closing

For open components, we will auto close them to make them valid. Eg

>> -- ftd.column: foo
.. 

When user has just typed this, we will auto close the column so we can see the column.

Editing Past Commands

One problem with shells usually is editing past commands. We want to make it easy, so instead of using a readline based UI, where past commands are just "printed", and we can not go back and edit them. We want something like python notebook but on terminal.

We can do this by making this a curses based UI, where we are rendering the entire screen, and scrolling using up/down arrows are controlled by us.

We will give