cmd is also very bare-bones. It forms the backbone of sqlpython, and while improving that package, I've created cmd2. cmd2 is an extension for cmd that adds helpful functionality without requiring any changes to cmd-based applications.
- Searchable command history
- Load commands from file, save to file, edit commands in file
- Multi-line commands
- Case-insensitive commands
- Special-character shortcut commands (beyond cmd's "@" and "!")
- Settable environment parameters
- Parsing commands with flags
I've found several alternatives to cmd in the Cheese Shop - CmdLoop, cly, CMdO, and pycopia. cly looks wonderful, but I haven't been able to get it working under Windows, and that's a show-stopper for many potential sqlpython users. In any case, none of the alternatives are based on cmd - they're written from scratch, which means that a cmd-based app would need complete rewriting to use them. I like sticking close to the Standard Library whenever possible. cmd2 lets you do that.
Switching a cmd application to cmd2 is as simple as changing from
from cmd import Cmd to from cmd2 import Cmd, and the new functionality is ready to go. See a usage example of cmd2.It's in the Cheese Shop, so you can easy_install cmd2. (Cheese Shop page for cmd2)
2 comments:
I was not able to attend pycon 2010, so I have been checking out the Miro videos and just saw your talk on cmd2. It is awesome and I can see a couple of uses right off the top of my head. Especially, I am thinking of an interactive version of Petit: opensource.eyemg.com/Petit
Also, have you tried using it as the interpreter in bash scripts? That has always been my biggest complaint of ALL python scripting ( I am a sysadmin and still love the elegance of in line commands in bash). It would be phenomenal to be able to run commands in line and use python in a single script.
Any plans to do a version of cmd2 that uses argparse instead of optparse?
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