I've been working on a command to run an external file (@file, @clean ...). I think it is ready, and I'd appreciate it if other folks could test it for me. The idea is that you select a node in the external file tree and launch the command. It works on Windows and Linux but not Mac (I need more information about the Mac, and I don't have one for testing).
As long as the processing program such as Ruby, Python, Julia, is on the path (and the file is a known file type) - or you specify it in a @data setting node - a new terminal will open, run your GUI or console program, and wait for you to close it. The new command is the @button node in the attached Leo outline. I suggest copying in into the @buttons tree in your myLeoSettings.leo outline and restarting Leo. The languages it can handle without adding an @data node - it's documented in the command's docstring - are python, shell, batch (for Windows), ruby, lua, and julia. Here are some technical details - This command was hard to get working right on Linux (and I can't swear that it will work on Linux if the external file name has spaces), and the reason was my requirement to open a new terminal and keep it open after the external program finishes. I want that so that any output can be seen and studied. It's easy to launch a program and have it write to Leo's own console, but that is not ideal, because 1) other Leo output may get mixed in with the external program's or the output may get scrolled offscreen; 2) if the external program crashes, it may leave your Leo console running a secondary shell; and 3) if you launch a GUI program that lasts a long time your output may get very confusing. It turns out that to reliably keep the new terminal open on Linux, you have to open a terminal and use that to run the shell, not just launch the shell. This is a problem because there are a lot of Linux distros and they don't all have the same terminal. In particular, the different terminals don't always use the same options to run a shell with its command line. The shell may also differ. Almost all desktops use bash, usually at /usr/bin/bash, but a user can change that and some do. So we can't assume that the shell will be bash, nor what the terminal may be. x-terminal-emulator does not give you the same options across distros, either. $TERM doesn't actually give you the terminal either, just a logical terminal so the right colors can be set up. To keep the terminal open after the command runs, some terminals have an option for that, some have the option but it doesn't work, and some don't have the option. Also, the option name is subject to change (I found at least one distro that issued a deprecation warning) So we need another solution. My solution is to have the shell wait for user input after the main command finishes. After a long time running queries on the Internet I have not found a more workable way. So how do we find the terminal and shell? By running pstree -s $$ and parsing its output. Then we run that terminal with --help and try to parse the help message to find the right option. This works on all cases I've tried, but it's probably a little fragile. If the shell isn't bash, or we can't figure it out, we use the $SHELL variable. Then we use the command's internal table, or the system file association, to find the right processor to run. We also check to make sure it can actually be found. Finally we can construct the command and run it. Whew, that was tricky! It's easier on Windows because we don't have to discover the terminal and shell, and the launch options are always the same. For the Mac, I don't know the terminal or shell names nor the right options to invoke. I'm pretty sure that if I learn them this command will work on a Mac too. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/36247aea-808c-42b1-8593-21945cf782fen%40googlegroups.com.
<<attachment: x-run-ext-file.zip>>
