Per's UI blog entries

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:13:49 -0800
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Terminal-Shell integration - a proposed specification

Shell integration refers to a protocol between a terminal emulator and a shell (or other REPL) to provide various features, some shown below. The main idea is that the shell sends extra escape sequences to mark the various parts of a command: prompt, input, and output. Terminals that have supported some variation of this concept include XMLterm, GraphTerm, FinalTerm, Iterm2, ExtraTerm, and DomTerm. These protocols are not consistent and have missing funtionality, so I have been working on a proposed specification.
The rest of this article will show some of the supported features, and discuss some unresolved issues. If you want to try out the current state, please clone DomTerm, and follow the build instructions. Best results (and the following screenshots) use the current gitgub master of Fish, after sourcing tools/shell-integration.fish (in the DomTerm sources).
Visually separate commands from each other

Shell integration enables each command (with its associated input and output) to be separated from other commands. The default DomTerm styling uses a thin partially-transparent green line you can see in the screenshot below
Different styling for prompt, input, and output

It is helpful to use a different styling for input and output. A simple version is to add distinctive styling for the prompt, but adding styling for entire input lines is even better. The DomTerm default styling (for light mode) is a pale green background for the prompt, a light yellow for the actual input, and a slighly darker yellow for the rest of the input line. Using pale background colors makes it less likely that it will conflict with user color preferences, including syntax coloring.

Note that the actual user input are distictively styled, even spaces. It is helpful to see what are the actual input characters, to avoid surprises in selection or cursor movement. The above echo -n foo \ illustrates this - the input line ends with two spaces: The final space is removed by the fish parser, but the space before is escaped by a backslash, as you can see in the output. (The down-arrow ⏎ symbol is emitted by fish to indicate a missing final newline in the output. The output ends in two spaces: one following foo in the input and one following the backspash.)
Button to hide/show command output

One useful feature enabled by shell integration is a button to hide (or show) the output of a command. DomTerm puts a downward triangle in the right gutter of the first line if there is any output or more than one input line. Clicking on the button hides all but the first line, and changes the triangle to a right-pointing one (that can be clicked to restore the hidden lines).

DomTerm places the hide/show button in the same right gutter that is also used to mark wrapped long lines (as shown above). The same area is also used to show error status (below), and for the cursor when at the end of a line.
Show error status

When a command finishes, the application can send the exit status in an escape sequence to the terminal. DomTerm handles a non-zero exit status by displaying a red circle in the right gutter of the last line of the command. (If there is no output, as with the false command, the circle appears in the last input line.) Hovering over the red circle displays the exit code.

Move cursor using mouse

People new to shells usually expect that they can move the input cursor using a mouse click, and are surprised when it doesn't work. Experienced shell users also sometimes want this ability, for example making an edit to a long command. This can be implemented using xterm-style mouse handling, but that is non-trivial to implement. It also has some undesirable side-effects, including disabling the default mouse behavior for selection and for context menus.
A simpler solution is to configure a terminal emulator to map a mouse click to the appropriate number of cursor-motion keystrokes. By default, the terminal can send the escape sequences emitted for the Left and Right arrow keys. This works well for many unmodified REPL applications. (However, to avoid surprises, this has to be specifically enabled by adding a special escape sequence to the prompt.)
DomTerm also allows you to force mouse-click translation: If the Alt modifier is pressed during a left mouse-click, the DomTerm sends the appropriate arrow-key sequence to move the cursor, even if translation has not been eplicitly requested. This is useful for an application like vim, which understands arrow keys but does not have mouse handling by default.
Motion is easy to handle when moving within a single line. Some input editors (such as fish_ support multi-line input areas. Things get more complicated when the mouse-click is a different line than the current position. When the terminal calculates the arrow-key sequence it must be able to ignore prompts and non-significant spacing, such as the indentation fish emits, or the space before any right-edge prompt. Another issue is what kind cursor motion the terminal should send: For fish you only want to send Left/Right arrows, since Up/Down moves through the history. The draft protocol and the DomTerm implementation support multiple options.
Integrating the selection and clipboard

How to integrate the system selection and clipboard with the input editor raises a number of questions that deserve a separate article. The way Emacs integrates the "region" with the selection seems a good approach (but the devil is in the details).
In DomTerm, if you make a selection that ends inside the input area, then DomTerm moves the cursor to the end of the selection (in the same way as if you clicked):

If you type Shift-Right or Shift-Left (optionally with Ctrl) the selection is extended and the cursor moved to the new endpoint. For example, typing Ctrl-Shift-Right extends the selection by one word:

Typing Ctrl-Shift-X copies the selection to the clipboard, and deletes it by emulating the appropriate number of Delete or Backspace key-presses.
Coming soon is having Delete or Backspace delete the selection, without copying to the clipboard.
Re-flow on window re-size

Many terminals will automatically re-flow (re-break) wrapped lines when the window width is changed. The terminal will also send a notification to the application, which may also re-display the output to take into account the changed size. The re-display done by the terminal may be conflict with that done by the application. For fullscreen applications it's not a problem because the applications can clear the buffer and re-paint, which clear any conflicting re-flow done by the terminal. For shells it is trickier: Suppose the current input fits on one line, but the window is made narrower. The terminal re-wraps the line as two lines. Then the application gets the window-changed notification, and redisplays the input line - but without taking into account the terminal's re-wrap, making a mess of the display.
This is a hard problem: Having the application assume re-wrap has happened is unreliable, because another re-size and re-wrap may have happened in the meanwhile. It is better to disable terminal re-wrap for the current line (the one containing the cursor), but that breaks in the case of multi-line input if the application re-sends previous input lines.
The proposed specification recommends that on re-size the application re-sends a prompt-start escape sequence, but not the command-start escape sequence. The terminal can if needed move the cursor to the first input line when it sees the prompt-start sequence. This seems to work pretty well.
(Better would be to let the terminal can handle the re-wrap, and the application not do re-display at all. This avoids the race condition, and it makes old input lines wrap the same way as the current line. However, that may require more radical protocol changes: It works best if the application can act as if the available width is unlimited, and delegate line-breaking it to the terminals.)
Select only real user input

When selecting and copying text that includes input it is usually more useful to ignore indentation, prompts, and extra spacing (such as between user input and a right prompt).
Right and continution prompts
Some shells and input libraries (including fish and JLine3) let the application specify a right prompt displayed at the right of the line. This may complicate selection/copy, as you may not want to include the right prompt (especially in the middle of multi-line input), nor do you want selection to include the spacing before the prompt. Ideally, reflow after width change should adjust the spacing so the prompt of old input lines stays at the right. (This is not yet implemented.) Fish will only display the right prompt if there enough space; ideally this should be taken account on reflow.

Created 14 Jun 2019 16:27 PDT. Last edited 16 Oct 2019 13:03 PDT. Tags: DomTerm UI

JavaScript menus for native-looking applications

Using web technologies for the GUI of a desktop application makes a lot of sense: they're portable, familiar, and powerful. A popular option is to use a comprehensive framework such as Electron. However, you might want the option of using a regular desktop browser — maybe you want to be able to access your application remotely, or you might prefer a lighter-weight embedded browser such as webview.
For a native-looking application you probably want menus: a top menubar as well as a pop-up (context) menu. While the various embedded platforms (such as Electron) each have their own APIs for menus, there is no standard JavaScript API. The DomTerm terminal emulator can be run with a small Electron wrapper (in which case it uses Electron menus), but it can also run in a plain browser like Firefox or Chrome. So I looked around for a lightweight menu library that would work in a desktop browser, but I didn't find anything I liked: They were unmaintained, or too big, or depended on some other library (such as jQuery), or were incomplete (popup menus but no menubar support, or missing keyboard navigation), or had an API too different from Electron's relatively simple one.

I finally found Sam Wray's nwjs-menu-browser, which satisfied most of the goals. It was strandalone, modest size, handled menubars as well as popups, and had an API similar to NW.js (which is similar to that of Electron). However, it had some issues. Missing features included keyboard navigation, inability to share menu-items between menus, and some smaller problems. I also found the build process too complicated for me.

The jsMenus library is a much-changed fork of nwjs-menu-browser. The functionality (and API) are very similar to that of Electron. In fact DomTerm uses much of the same JavaScript to construct menus whether using Electron or jsMenus. To see most of the features in action, check this live demo. It should be easy to figure out how it works from the demo.html source. You can also read the API documentation.

Finally, here is screenshot of jsMenus in action. This is DomTerm, using the Chrome browser. Chrome was started with the --app command-line option, which (among other things) disables the default menubar and location bar.

Created 29 Jul 2018 14:09 PDT. Last edited 29 Jul 2018 16:11 PDT. Tags: DomTerm UI

DomTerm terminal emulator now has draggable panes and tabs

The DomTerm terminal emulator now supports sub-windows (panes) and tabs. These are resizable and draggable. This is implemented using the GoldenLayout JavaScript library.
The screenshot below shows 3 sub-windows. The lower one has two tabs, domterm-2 and domterm-3. The latter has focus (indicated by the magenta border), and is running the mc file manager. The upper left pane (domterm-1) shows how to embed html from the shell. The domterm-4 pane shows using Kawa to create composable picture values which are displayed using embedded SVG.
You can resize panes by dragging the separator between them, and you can re-arrange panes or tabs by dragging a title bar. The screenshot shows as we are dragging the splitter between the two upper panes; the blue rectangles temporarily display the resulting sizes.

Compared to GNU screen or tmux, DomTerm supports more flexible layouts and easier manipulation using either mouse or keyboard. However, DomTerm does not yet support sessions that can be detached or accessed by multiple users at once, though I do hope to add it. Until then, I suggest using abduco or dtach to handle session management.

Created 5 Jul 2017 20:46 PDT. Last edited 6 Jul 2017 10:18 PDT. Tags: DomTerm UI

Dynamic Pretty-printing in DomTerm

The DomTerm terminal emulator has a number of unique features. In this article we will explore how it enables dynamic re-flow for Lisp-style pretty-printing.
The goal of pretty-printing is to split a text into lines with appropriate indentation, in a way that conforms to the logical structure of the text.
For example if we need to print the following list:

((alpha-1 alpha-2 alpha-3) (beta-1 beta-2 beta-3 beta-4))

in a window 40 characters wide, we want:

((alpha-1 alpha-2 alpha-3)
 (beta-1 beta-2 beta-3 beta-4))

but not:

((alpha-1 alpha-2 alpha-3) (beta-1
 beta-2 beta-3 beta-4))

Pretty-printing is common in Lisp environments to display complicated nested data structures. Traditionally, it is done by the programming-language runtime, based on a given line width. However, the line width of a console can change if the user resizes the window or changes font size. In that case, previously-emitted pretty-printed lines will quickly become ugly: If the line-width decreases, the breaks will be all wrong and the text hard to read; if the line-width increases we may be using more lines than necessary.
Modern terminal emulators do dumb line-breaking: Splitting a long lines into screen lines, but regardless of structure or even word boundaries. Some emulators remember for each line whether an overflow happened, or whether a hard newline was printed. Some terminal emulators (for example Gnome Terminal) will use this to re-do the splitting when a window is re-sized. However, that does not help with pretty-printer output.
Until now. Below is a screenshot from Kawa running in DomTerm at 80 colutions.

We reduce the window size to 50 columns. The user input (yellow background) is raw text, so its line is split non-pretty, but the output (white background) gets pretty re-splitting. (Note the window size indicator in the lower-right.)

We reduce the window size to 35 columns:

It also works with saved pages

DomTerm allows you to save the current session as a static HTML page. If the needed DomTerm CSS and JavaScript files are provided in the hlib directory, then dynamic line-breaking happens even for saved log files. (The lazy way is to create hlib as a symbolic link to the hlib directory of the DomTerm distribution.)
Try it yourself on a saved session. The --debug-print-expr flag causes Kawa to print out each command before it is compiled and evaluated. The result (shown in red because it is sent to the standard error stream) is pretty-printed dynamically.
Structured text

This is how it works.
When an application pretty-prints a structure, it calls special output procedures to mark which parts of the output logically belong together (a logical block), and where line-breaks and indentation may be inserted. In Kawa the default print formatting for lists and vectors automatically calls these procedures when the output is a pretty-printing stream. The pretty-printing library calculates where to put line-breaks and indentation, based on these commands and the specified line length.
However, when the output stream is a DomTerm terminal, Kawa's pretty-printing library does not actually calculate the line-breaks. Instead it encodes the above-mentioned procedure calls as special escape sequences that get sent to DomTerm.
When DomTerm receives these escape sequences, it builds a nested DOM structure that corresponds to the orginal procedure calls. DomTerm calculates how to layout that structure using a variant of the Common Lisp pretty-printing algorithm, inserting soft left-breaks and indentation as needed.
When DomTerm detects that its window has been re-sized or zoomed, it first removes old soft line-breaks and identation. It does re-runs the layout algorithm.
When a page is saved, the nested DOM structure is written out too. If the saved page is loaded in a browser, and the necessary JavaScript libraries are available, then the pretty-printing algorithm is run on the saved page, both on initial load, and whenever the window is re-sized.
Hyphenation and word-breaking
DomTerm supports general soft (optional) line breaks: You can specify separate texts (optionally with styling) for each of the following: The text used when the line is not broken at that point; the text to use before the line-break, when broken (commonly a hyphen); the text to use after the line-break (following indentation). One use for this words that change their spelling when hyphenated, as may happen in German. For example the word backen becomes bak-ken. You can handle this using ck as the non-break text; k- as the pre-break text; and k as the post-break text.

Created 30 Jan 2017 13:23 PST. Last edited 3 Feb 2017 12:13 PST. Tags: DomTerm Kawa UI

Gnuplot display on DomTerm

I have recently spent a lot of time on DomTerm, which is becoming a fairly decent terminal emulator. Being based on HTML5 technologies lets you do many interesting things, including embed graphics. The new qtdomterm standalone terminal emulator is especially nice; alternatively, you can also use the domterm --browser command to start a process that uses a window/tab in your default desktop browser.
The gnuplot package is a powerful graphing package. It has a command-line that lets you specify complicated functions and plots, and then give a plot command to display the resulting plot. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a a good front-end that is usable for both command-line interaction and graphics. People usually have to specify output to either a file or an external viewer. Would that one could insert the plots directly in the REPL output stream!
The development version of gnuplot (i.e. 5.1, available from CVS) has native support for DomTerm. It has domterm as a new terminal type, which you can select explicitly (with the command set term domterm), or use by default (since gnuplot checks the DOMTERM environment variable, which is set by DomTerm).
This works by using the pre-existing svg output driver to generate SVG, but surrounding the SVG by escape sequences, and then printing the result to standard output. DomTerm recognizes the escape sequence, extracts the SVG (or more generally clean HTML) and inserts it at the cursor.
You can save the session output to an html file. Here is an example. In qtdomterm you can use the File / Save As menu item; otherwise ctrl-shift-S should work. This is a single html file, with embedded SVG; images are embedded with a data: URL. The file is actually XML (xhtml), to make it easier to process. The saved file does need to css and js (JavaScript) files to be readable, so you need to link or copy the hlib directory in the DomTerm source distribution.

Created 18 Aug 2016 20:45 PDT. Last edited 21 Sep 2016 23:06 PDT. Tags: DomTerm UI

Scripting API for compiled JavaFX

The new read-eval-print-loop (REPL) for JavaFX required some major changes in the scripting API for JavaFX. JavaFX had for a while supported the javax.script API specified by JSR-223. However, that JavaFX implementation didn't allow you to declare a variable in one "eval" and make it visible in future commands, which made it rather useless for a REPL. This turns out to be somewhat tricky for a compiled language with static name binding and typing. Unfortunately, JSR-223 has some fundamental design limitations in that respect. (Embarrassingly, I was a not-very-active member of the JSR-223 expert group. It would have been better if we could have thought a little more about scripting staticly-typed languages, but we didn't have time.)
Design limitations in javax.script

Top-level name-to-value bindings in JSR-223 are stored in a javax.script.Bindings instance, which is basically a Map. Unfortunately, Bindings is a concrete class that the programmer can directly instantiate and add bindings to, and there is no way to synchronize a Bindings instance with the internal evaluator state. (Note that top-level bindings have to be maintained in a language-dependent data structure if the language supports static typing, since typing is language-dependent.) This means the script engine has to explicitly copy every binding from the Bindings object to the language evaluator - or the script evaluator has to be modified to search the Bindings. Worse, if a script modifies or declares a binding, that has to be copied back to the Bindings, which is an even bigger pain.
This problem could have been avoided if Bindings were an abstract class to be implemented by the language script engine. An alternative solution could allow the evaluator to register itself as as listener on the Bindings object.
JSR-223 does support compilation being separate from evaluation. Unfortunately, it assumes that name-to-value bindings are needed during evaluation but not during compilation. This is problematic in a language with lexical binding, and fails utterly in a language with static typing: The types of bindings have to be available at compile-time, not just run-time.
The Invocable interface is also problematical. It invokes a function or method in a ScriptEngine, without passing in a ScriptContext, even though invoking a function is basically evaluation, which should require a ScriptContext.
The ScriptContext interface has an extra complication in that it consists of two Bindings objects, of which the global one seems to have limited utility. Making it worse is that some methods use the default ScriptContext of a ScriptEngine and some take an explicit ScriptContext parameter.
The new JavaFX scripting API

Because of these problems with javax.script, I implemented a new JavaFX-specific API. These classes are currently in the com.sun.tools.javafx.script package; after some shaking down they might be moved to some other package, perhaps javafx.script.
The class JavaFXScriptCompiler manages the compilation context, including the typed bindings preserved between compilations, and a MemoryFileManager pseudo-filesystem that saves the bytecode of previously compiled commands.
The main method of JavaFXScriptCompiler is compile. This takes a script, compiles it, and (assuming no errors) returns a JavaFXCompiledScript.
The main method of JavaFXCompiledScript is eval, which takes a JavaFXScriptContext, evaluates the script, and returns the result value.
The JavaFXScriptContext contains the evaluation state, which is primarily a ClassLoader. Creating a JavaFXScriptContext automatically creates a JavaFXScriptCompiler, so in the current implementation there is a one-to-one relationship between JavaFXScriptContext and JavaFXScriptCompiler. (In the future we might allow multiple JavaFXScriptContext instances to share a single JavaFXScriptCompiler.)
This API is very much subject to change.
The REPL API

The actual REPL is provided by the ScriptShell class, which is implemented using the above API. It first reads in commands from the command line (the -e option), or a named file (the -f option). It then enters the classic REPL loop: Print a prompt, read a line, evaluate it, and print the result.
Most of these behaviors can be customized by overriding a method. For example when the compiler finds an error it creates a Diagnostic object, which is passed to a report method. The default handling is to print the Diagnostic, but a sub-class of ScriptShell could override report to do something else with the Diagnostic.
The ScriptShell API is also very much subject to change as we get more experience with it.
The new javax.script wrapper

The class JavaFXScriptEngineImpl is the JavaFX implementation of the standard javax.script.AbstractScriptEngine class. It was re-written to be a wrapper on top of the API discussed earlier. Because of the previously-mentioned limitations of javax.script it is not completely faithful implementation of JSR-223. It uses a WeakHashMap to translate from the Bindings used by the javax.script API into the JavaFXScriptContext objects used by the internal API. Compilation and evaluation of a script need to use JavaFXScriptContext consistently. This means there are basically two usage modes that should work:

It is best to always use the default ScriptContext as returned by the ScriptEngine's getContext method. Don't call createBindings, getBindings, setBindings, or setContext.
If you really need to use any of the above four methods, don't try to use either of the compile methods. The reason for this is that compilation does need to use the script context, and it should be the same as used for evaluation.

Created 26 Feb 2009 16:52 PST. Last edited 2 Mar 2009 10:12 PST. Tags: JavaFX UI

A read-eval-print-loop for JavaFX

JavaFX now supports a read-eval-print-loop ("repl"). This will be in the next ("Marina") release, but you can get it now from the Mercurial repository - see the compiler home page, which links to these instructions.
A read-eval-print-loop is a well-known feature of many language implementations, but isn't that common with compiled languages, especially ones that have static typing and lexical name lookup.
See this companion article on the scripting API and implementation issues.
The class com.sun.tools.javafx.script.ScriptShell implements the actual repl. It is an application that was based on the language-independent jrunscript command. but you can also subclass it if you want to customize it.
To run the REPL, start the ScriptShell application - for example:

$ CLASSPATH=/tmp:dist/lib/shared/javafxc.jar \
  java com.sun.tools.javafx.script.ScriptShell

Then you type commands at it:

/*fx1*/ var xy = 12
12
/*fx2*/ xy+10
12

The prompt has the form of a comment, to make it easier to cut-and-paste. The name inside the comments is used as the name of a "scriptlet" which shows up in error messages and exceptions.
You can define functions, modify variables, and call functions:

/*fx3*/ function xy_plus (n:Integer):Integer { xy + n }
/*fx4*/ ++xy
13
/*fx5*/ xy_plus(100)
113

You get warnings:

/*fx6*/ xy=2.5
fx6:1: possible loss of precision
found   : Number
required: Integer
2

and errors:

/*fx7*/ xy="str"
fx7:1: incompatible types
found   : String
required: Integer

and exceptions:

/*fx8*/ xy/0
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616)
    at com.sun.tools.javafx.script.JavaFXCompiledScript.eval(JavaFXCompiledScript.java:59)
    at com.sun.tools.javafx.script.ScriptShell.evaluate(ScriptShell.java:350)
    at com.sun.tools.javafx.script.ScriptShell.evaluateString(ScriptShell.java:311)
    at com.sun.tools.javafx.script.ScriptShell.processSource(ScriptShell.java:244)
    at com.sun.tools.javafx.script.ScriptShell$1.run(ScriptShell.java:177)
    at com.sun.tools.javafx.script.ScriptShell.main(ScriptShell.java:51)
Caused by: java.lang.ArithmeticException: / by zero
    at fx8.javafx$run$(fx8]:1)
    ... 10 more

Each command is single line. In the future I hope we'll be able to tell when a command is incomplete, so the reader can keep reading more lines until it has a complete command.
Re-definition
You can redefine variables (and functions and classes), but previously-compiled references refer to the earlier definition:

/*fx9*/ var xy:String="str"
str
/*fx10*/ xy
str
/*fx11*/ xy_plus(100)
102

Now this is correct in terms of static name-binding, but perhaps not the most useful. What you probably want is for xy_plus to use the new definition of xy. This is what would happen in a typical dynamic language with dynamic typing and dynamic name-lookup, but with of compilation and static name-lookup xy_plus uses the the defintion seen when it was compiled.
Fixing this would involve some combination of automatic re-compilation (if xy_plus depends on xy, and xy is redefined, then re-compile xy_plus), and extra indirection.
A related issue is that forward references aren't allowed, which means you can't declare mutually dependent functions or classes - unless you type them all in the same command - i.e. on one line! Automatic recompilation could alleviate this: When a command is compiled, we not only remember the declarations it depends on, but also any missing symbols, so we can re-compile it if those later get declared.
Memory and start-up issues

Be aware that executing the first command causes a noticable pause. While I haven't profiled this, I'm guessing it is just because we need to load most of javafxc (which includes most of (a hacked-up version of) javac), and that takes some time. Subsequent commands run much faster.
Right now we don't do any smart reclaiming of classes. Each command compiles into one or more classes, which are kept around because they may be needed for future commands. Also, the bytecode array of a command is also kept around, since it may be needed when compiling future commands. Hopefully in the future we'll be more clever, so we can get-rid of no-longer-useful classes.

Created 26 Feb 2009 16:51 PST. Last edited 27 Feb 2009 17:38 PST. Tags: JavaFX UI

A Swing-based read-eval-print interface

I've long been interested in improved commend-line interfaces. The latest Kawa (in SVN) has a new implementation of a command interface window. If you start up Kawa with the -w flag:

kawa -w

you get a new Swing JFrame, whose interesting component is a JTextPane for typing in expressions, and displaying the results. The following example uses Kawa's default language Scheme, but works for other Kawa languages, including XQuery.

Color coding

Here the command prompt is in green, and the input command is in bold-face, because it seems useful to emphasize the input as a way of visually separating one command from the previous. The standard error output is in red. Standard output has the plain default style. This is because standard output may have embedded in it other objects and nested styled text.

All of these are implemented using Swing style objects. There is currently no mechanism to modify one these styles, except by modifying the source code, but at some point we will support that.

Input editing

While the color-coding is pretty, even more important is command-line editing. That is you can move the input cursor along the input line, and insert, delete, or replace text before hitting Enter. This is previously available using the GNU readline library, which has some nice features, including a searchable history mechanism. However, you cannot move the cursor using the mouse, which is surprising to many.

Currently, the entire text pane is editable using the default JTextPane keystrokes and mouse handlers. (It would be better that at least the prompt be non-editable.) Nothing gets sent to the receiving reader until you type Enter. At that point the entire line containing the cursor, except for the prompt, is sent to the reader. (More precisely: If the cursor is at or after the output position, the rest of the line after the output position is sent. Otherwise, usually it's a way of repeating or modifying a previous line. In that case the contents of that line, except any initial prompt segment, are first copied to the end of the text buffer, as if typed there, before being sent to the reader.)

If you paste a multi-line string (commonly using ctrl-V), then ReplPane magically interleaves the prompt string and output with the input text. For example if you paste the following text:

(display "foo")
(newline)
(display
  "bar")
(newline)

You get this result:

Note that the prompt for line 4 is different because it's a continuation line. (Alas, this feature is not very robust; it is easy to get Swing exceptions.)

Embedding Components

A powerful feature is that you "print" java.awt.Component objects. These are embedded in the JTextPane. The following Scheme example creates a list of 3 JButton objects, and that list is then "printed":

We can of course save a reference to the button in a variable:

That allows us to modify properies of the button. Here we change its text property, in line 4, and the button is updated as soon as we hit enter:

One anomaly when "printing" a Component is that a Component can only appear once. If we "print" it a second time, it is as a side-effect removed from the first place it was printed:

This isn't really the right behavior, but it's unavoidable when "printing" a Component. To avoid the problem, we need to "print" a some kind of "model" object rather than "view" objects.

Embedding Viewable objects

The experimental swing-gui library provides "viewable model" objects that can also be "printed" to a TextPane. For example, the gnu.kawa.models.Button class goes beyond Swing's ButtonModel in also having text and an action procedure. When a gnu.kawa.models.Button is "printed" the implementation automatically creates a JButton that is co-ordinated with the gnu.kawa.models.Button:

Again, we can change the text property:

Here we do some more complex layout, creating a Row displaying the same button twice, separated by a spacer. Then we create a column that displays the same row twice, separated by a text field. (For some reason the text field isn't displaying properly.)

Playing with composable Java2D pictures

The swing-gui library also provides convenience wrappers to the gnu.kawa.models.Paintable interface, which makes it easy to create, compose, and transform Java2D Shape objects.

Issues

The ReplPane is not very solid. It's not hard to type something which causes a Swing exception, which is usually not recoverable.

There should be a View menu to modify fornts and styles, and a standard Edit menu to Cut/Copy/Paste, at least. The File menu should have a way to save the typescript.

The Utilities->Purge Buffer menu item doesn't work.

The display should be integrated with the Kawa pretty-printer, so that changing the window width recalculates line-breaks.

It would be nice to emit styled "inline" (text) objects, such as a "red string". Maybe we should be using Swing's HTMLDocument instead of DefaultStyledDocument. Another toolkit to consider is Flying Saucer.

Created 11 Sep 2007 08:52 PDT. Last edited 11 Sep 2007 08:52 PDT. Tags: Scheme UI kawa