ShellScr

ShellScr is Amiga software that opens a full screen dedicated to displaying a single, full-screen AmigaDOS shell.

History

Around October 1992, I discovered I'd be getting an Amiga for Xmas. So I started getting the Amiga Format magazine, which happened to give away Devpac 2 (the Hisoft editor, assembler and debugger). Some time later, I started getting the Amiga Shopper magazine, which went on in the coding bits about the 'RKRMs'. So I got these out of the library and tried all this 'cool new stuff' from the Libraries RKM about public screens. The Amiga allows you more than one screen, which can have differing resolution and colour depth, and allows you to drag them up and down and flick between them.

The first real, whole program I wrote in assembler was called scrsh (screen shell), around the middle of 1994. It was a small utility to open a new screen, and open a shell - the Amiga's command line interpreter - on it. This not only made use of those cool new public screens, but also did exactly what I wanted - to have a shell on a different screen from Devpac, so I could have both of them taking the full screen, and pressing a simple combination would flick between them.

However, scrsh never tested if anything went wrong, and it was fixed to 640x256 PAL Hires screen with the CON: window. Many years later, I got myself an A1200, and I started to realise that my best utility needed updating, so I started to write ShellScr in Amiga E instead of assembler.

ShellScr has been through more than two years of development, and has every feature I and others could think of added to it. It also has had every bug ever seen removed from it.

Download ShellScr

ShellScr can be downloaded from Aminet.

What ShellScr does

ShellScr opens a shell, not in a little window, but a whole screen. That's all, but it does it very well.

ShellScr benefits

  • ShellScr is very easy to use. All you have to do is run it, and it opens a screen with a shell on it. Easy!
  • The standard installation program is used, if you've ever installed software on your Amiga, you should be familiar with it.
  • ShellScr is very stable, as you would expect for a simple task. I've eradicated all known bugs from it.
  • ShellScr is completely localised, so whatever language you speak, ShellScr's messages will make sense. ShellScr's documentation is available in 8 languages. Many thanks to the Amiga Translator's Organisation for doing the hard work here.
  • You can choose exactly what kind of screen to open (ie resolution, monitor, colour depth). You can name the kind screen in any way possible, including raw hexidecimal numbers (ID=0x29000), or by the screen mode's actual name (ID="PAL:High Res"). If you specify a question mark as the name (ID=?), you will get a standard screen mode requester. If you don't specify anything, you'll get a screen like the Workbench.
  • There are also some special screen options - SHANGHAI (difficult to explain), NOTITLE (use the entire screen for the shell, without a title bar on the screen), and AUTOSCROLL (if you drag the screen off the display, you can scroll it back onto the display just by moving the mouse).
  • You can choose whatever font you want for the shell. Again, there are flexible ways of stating this font ("topaz", "topaz/8" or "topaz.8"), including the standard font requester. Again, the Workbench font is used if you don't ask for anything else.
  • Finally, you can use any kind of shell windowing system with ShellScr. At the moment, there are three I know of, the standard CON: system device, the replacement KingCON (KCON:), and the even better replacement ViNCEd (VNC:). Here are some option settings for them:
    • WINDOW=KCON:%s//BACKDROP/NOBORDER/ NOSIZE/NODRAG/NODEPTH/NOCLOSE/SCREEN%s (all one line)
    • WINDOW=VNC:%s//SCREEN%s/SHELL/BACKDROP/NOBORDER/ NOCLOSE/SHELL/MENU (all one line)
    • WINDOW="VNC:%s//SCREEN%s/BACKDROP/NOBORDER/ NOCLOSE/SHELL/MENU/STITLEAmigaShell - %%s" (all one line)

I hope that's convinced you -- for all your shell opening needs, use ShellScr! If you think that ShellScr is too much, why not use its little brother, the resurrected scrsh?