DOS prompt question .. Thread last updated on 2004-07-30 04:29:55

Posted by member 185606 on 2004-07-28 02:50:10

Hi all.

Kinda hard to explain ... okay, this is what I want.
I would like to have a transparent dos prompt as a desktop. (well more like in the left corner then the entire desktop arean)
Ofcours be able to start apps from that prompt with (perhaps?) !bang commands.
Customized fonts and color ...

Thats my wish list.

Any way to do this ???

I've seen people that have this feature in their themes, but on the other hand that could just be text graphics in the desktop picture. :-)

Posted by member 45783 on 2004-07-28 04:39:39 link

The stuff people had was Console2, which is, though good-looking, very resource-consuming and slow. There may be alternatives, but I'm not aware of any.

Also, it was just a frontend for the real MS command line. I don't know how one could execute bang commands from a shell, though that would definetely be cool.

Posted by member 37809 on 2004-07-28 07:30:54 link

Console (not Console2) has a feature that improves perceived performance tremendously IMO; it basically updates when there is a (text) change in the hidden console in addition to the original potentially-wasteful constant updating rate. And I also discovered you can directly copy and paste text in Console using the mouse. These features make it tolerable to use.

And to get bangs working, you could get bang.exe or bang32.exe from shellfront.org's modules page (I forget which is which, rename whichever to !.exe) and stick it in your %PATH%. Then you execute bangs though with a extra space character,
e.g. c:\windows\system32>! recycle
Of course you can do the same using litestep.exe but that's more typing.

I think someone could make a shell (in the same sense as for *nix, a command line interpreter) for cmd.exe, to try and recognize bangs normally, but I don't know. I remember ez3ki3l (sp?) years ago had a vaporware(?) LSTerm(?) :)

Posted by member 99 on 2004-07-28 12:21:14 link

Not perfect, but:
@echo off
setlocal
title LiteStep Command Shell
set LITESTEP="c:\litestep\litestep.exe"
:a
set /p c=%CD%^>
if "%c:~0,1%"=="!" set c=%LITESTEP% %c%
call %c%
goto a

Posted by member 185606 on 2004-07-28 13:45:54 link

Forgive me for being so extremly Lame, but does this only change the Prompt or does it open up for !Bangs ??

Posted by member 99 on 2004-07-29 00:35:12 link

Assuming you use the usual $P$G prompt, it doesn't change it. This prepends the path to litestep.exe to every line that comes in starting with a ! so you can type bang commands without the extra space or needing !.exe in your path.

But it does bad things if the line starts with a " or some other stuff... and ctrl+c becomes evil. :/

Posted by member 185606 on 2004-07-29 04:02:14 link

How evil???

Is that in general use of ctrl-c or only when the command box is in front?

Posted by member 48370 on 2004-07-29 06:13:31 link

i just cant find some download link, but what you are searching for is console v1.5 by Marko Bozikovic ... its nice and fast - i love it ...

Posted by member 99 on 2004-07-29 11:47:16 link

Instead of breaking the current command in the console window, ctrl+c will ask if you want to terminate the batch file. It doesn't reach out of the window and interfere with ctrl+c for clipboard operations. It's just a batch file, after all...

Posted by member 28487 on 2004-07-29 17:20:58 link

muhKuh, Console 1.5 can be found at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/console/

Posted by member 48370 on 2004-07-30 02:50:48 link

thx for the link!

Posted by member 185606 on 2004-07-30 04:29:55 link

Kewl...
Thanks.