/clink

Bash's powerful command line editing in cmd.exe

Primary LanguageC++GNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

Overview

Clink combines the native Windows shell cmd.exe with the powerful command line editing features of the GNU Readline library, which provides rich completion, history, and line-editing capabilities. Readline is best known for its use in the well-known Unix shell Bash, the standard shell for Mac OS X and many Linux distributions.

Download

Downloads are available from the releases page.

See the issues page for known issues or to file new issues.

Features

  • The same line editing as Bash (from the GNU Readline library version 8.1).
  • History persistence between sessions.
  • Context sensitive completion;
    • Executables (and aliases).
    • Directory commands.
    • Environment variables.
  • Context sensitive colored input text.
  • New keyboard shortcuts;
    • Paste from clipboard (Ctrl+V).
    • Incremental history search (Ctrl+R and Ctrl+S).
    • Powerful completion (Tab).
    • Undo (Ctrl+Z).
    • Automatic cd .. (Ctrl+PgUp).
    • Environment variable expansion (Ctrl+Alt+E).
    • Doskey alias expansion (Ctrl+Alt+F).
    • Scroll the screen buffer (Alt+Up, etc).
    • (press Alt+H for many more...)
  • Directory shortcuts;
    • Typing a directory name followed by a path separator is a shortcut for cd /d to that directory.
    • Typing .. or ... is a shortcut for cd .. or cd ..\.. (each additional . adds another \..).
    • Typing - or cd - changes to the previous current working directory.
  • Scriptable completion with Lua.
  • Scriptable key bindings with Lua.
  • Colored and scriptable prompt.
  • Auto-answering of the "Terminate batch job?" prompt.

By default Clink binds Alt+H to display the current key bindings. More features can also be found in GNU's Readline and History libraries' manuals.

Usage

There are several ways to start Clink.

  1. If you installed the auto-run, just start cmd.exe. Run clink autorun --help for more info.
  2. To manually start, run the Clink shortcut from the Start menu (or the clink.bat located in the install directory).
  3. To establish Clink to an existing cmd.exe process, use <install_dir>\clink.exe inject.

Upgrading from Clink v0.4.9

The new Clink tries to be as backward compatible with Clink v0.4.9 as possible. However, in some cases upgrading may require a little bit of configuration work. More details can be found in Clink's documentation here.

Extending Clink

Clink can be extended through its Lua API which allows easy creation of context sensitive match generators, prompt filtering, and more. More details can be found in Clink's documentation here.

Building Clink

Clink uses Premake to generate Visual Studio solutions or makefiles for MinGW. Note that Premake >= 5.0-alpha12 is required.

  1. Cd to your clone of Clink.
  2. Run premake5.exe <toolchain> (where <toolchain> is one of Premake's actions - see premake5.exe --help)
  3. Build scripts will be generated in .build\<toolchain>. For example .build\vs2013\clink.sln.
  4. Call your toolchain of choice (VS, mingw32-make.exe, msbuild.exe, etc). GNU makefiles (Premake's gmake target) have a help target for more info.

Building Documentation

  1. Run npm install marked to install the marked markdown library.
  2. Run premake5.exe docs.

Debugging Clink

  1. Start Clink using any of the normal ways.
  2. Launch a debugger such as Visual Studio.
  3. Attach the debugger to the CMD.exe process that Clink was injected into.
    • If you break into the debugger now, it will be inside Clink code, waiting for keyboard input.
  4. Here are some breakpoints that might be useful:
    • host::edit_line is the start of showing a prompt and accepting input.
    • line_editor_impl::update_matches is where the match pipeline uses .generate() to collect matches and .select() to filter the matches.
    • rl_module::on_input and readline_internal_char (and the _rl_dispatch inside it) is where keys are translated through Readline's keymap to invoke commands.
    • rl_complete or rl_menu_complete or rl_old_menu_complete are the Readline completion commands.
    • alternative_matches builds a Readline match array from the results collected by the match pipeline.

Debugging Lua Scripts

  1. Use clink set lua.debug true to enable using the Lua debugger.
  2. Use clink set lua.break_on_error true to automatically break into the Lua debugger on any Lua script error.
  3. Add a pause() line in a Lua script to break into the debugger at that spot, if the lua.debug setting is enabled.
  4. Use help in the Lua debugger to get help on using the Lua debugger.

License

Clink is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0.