Insert/Overwrite

[cjewison]

Is there any way of force TC to start in "Insert" Mode

As I am a Mac user, and Use TC through a Virtual machine my mac has no Insert Key
This hasn't been a problem in the past but suddenly in Version 12.10 it seems to have appeared.

If I start the command shell of Windows no problem Insert mode is on by default but not in TC

 

[Charles Dye]

Is there any way of force TC to start in "Insert" Mode

Type OPTION and press Enter. Select the third tab ("Command Line"); edit mode is the box in the upper right.

If you change the default edit mode, you may also want to exchange the cursor sizes.

 

[LuP]

Is there a way to force TCC to start in "Insert" mode, too?

E.g. - what to write to .ini?

 

[vefatica]

On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:50:18 -0400, LuP <> wrote:

|Is there a way to force TCC to start in "Insert" mode, too?
|
|E.g. - what to write to .ini?

OPTION\CommandLine\Editing\Insert (radio button)

... which should write "EditMode=Insert" to the INI file.

 

[Jay Sage]

On 10/4/2011 4:50 PM, LuP wrote:

> Is there a way to force TCC to start in "Insert" mode, too?

From Take Command's "Options" menu, open "Configure TCC..." or from TCC
run the "option" command. Select the "Command Line" tab. At the top
right you'll see the setting you're looking for.

-- Jay

 

[LuP]

... which should write "EditMode=Insert" to the INI file.

OK, thanks.

And does the TCC/LE use an .ini file, too?

(I mistyped in my previous question - I meant TCC/LE, not TakeCommand[/LE])?

If so, where is it located and what's its name? (I found only updater.ini in the TCC/LE installation directory.)

LuP

 

[Steve Fabian]

From: LuP
| And does the TCC/LE use an .ini file, too?
|
| (I mistyped in my previous question - I meant TCC/LE, not
| TakeCommand[/LE])?
|
| If so, where is it located and what's its name? (I found only
| updater.ini in the TCC/LE installation directory.)

Yes, it does. Once you start TCC/LE, the value of the _ininame variable is the fully qualified name of the .INI file it uses:

echo %_ininame

BTW, you can explicitly specify in the command line that start TCC/LE which file it is to use. See HELP topic TCC Startup Options.
--
HTH, Steve

 

[LuP]

Perfect, thank you.

I also added some more key=value pairs to the TCC .ini file (via help):

CursorIns=10
CursorOver=100

- this looks more familiarly for those who comes from cmd.exe.

I'd like to modify the prompt as well; I know this may be done via "prompt" command and thus via a startup file.

Is it possible to specify the prompt also via a key/value pair in the .ini file?

And - I'm just curious - what is the ".BMT" (TCC batch file) abbreviation of?

Thanks again.

LuP

 

[vefatica]

On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:06:10 -0400, LuP <> wrote:

|I'd like to modify the prompt as well; I know this may be done via "prompt" command and thus via a startup file.

No, but you can put it in the System or User environment
(MyComputer\Properties\Advanced\EnvironmentVariables).

 

[Charles Dye]

And - I'm just curious - what is the ".BMT" (TCC batch file) abbreviation of?

BTM = "Batch To Memory", because the shell slurps the entire file into memory once, as opposed to doing an open-seek-read-close cycle every time it fetches a line.

 

[Steve Fabian]

LuP:
| I'd like to modify the prompt as well; I know this may be done via
| "prompt" command and thus via a startup file.

vefatica:
| No, but you can put it in the System or User environment
| (MyComputer\Properties\Advanced\EnvironmentVariabl es).

But beware! I suspect if you do that the same prompt will be used by CMD, and if your prompt contains anything TCC-unique it will fail in CMD.

LuP:
| And - I'm just curious - what is the ".BMT" (TCC batch file) abbreviation of?

The default extension for TCC batch files is .BTM (not what you typed - I don't want to duplicate it). According to my internet search, it is an acronym for "Batch To Memory" - an allusion to a basic difference between 4DOS.COM (and its successors, 4NT.EXE and TCC.EXE) and COMMAND.COM (and its successor, CMD.EXE): 4DOS reads the whole batch file into memory at once before execution, COMMAND.COM reads and executes one line at a time.
--
Steve

 

[vefatica]

On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:15:16 -0400, Charles Dye <> wrote:

|---Quote (Originally by LuP)---
|And - I'm just curious - what is the ".BMT" (TCC batch file) abbreviation of?
|---End Quote---
|BTM = "Batch To Memory", because the shell slurps the entire file into memory once, as opposed to doing an open-seek-read-close cycle every time it fetches a line.

This has advantages in addition to speed. You can edit/save a BTM file while
it's running. And you can create BTM files which modify and restart themselves.

 

[vefatica]

On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:30:26 -0400, Steve Fabian <> wrote:

|vefatica:
|| No, but you can put it in the System or User environment
|| (MyComputer\Properties\Advanced\EnvironmentVariabl es).
|
|But beware! I suspect if you do that the same prompt will be used by CMD, and if your prompt contains anything TCC-unique it will fail in CMD.

Steve's right. And that's how it was for me for quite a while. But I used CMD
so seldom it dodn't bother me much. Now I have a PROMPT command in CMD's
autorun file.

Has it ever been suggested that there be "Prompt=" and "TitlePrompt=" INI
directives (OPTION)? They could be overridden by environment variables of the
same names for compatibility and special uses.

 

[samintz]

Even still, when you launch CMD from a
TCC window, CMD inherits TCC's environment. So invariably, I have
to type PROMPT to restore the default prompt in CMD.

My TCC prompt is:
PROMPT=^e[37;@if[%@remote[%_disk] eq 0,42,41];1m[$P]$s

Which is pretty cool in TCC but a bunch
of gibberish in CMD.

-Scott




On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:30:26 -0400, Steve
Fabian <> wrote:

|vefatica:
|| No, but you can put it in the System or User environment
|| (MyComputer\Properties\Advanced\EnvironmentVariabl es).
|
|But beware! I suspect if you do that the same prompt will be used by CMD,
and if your prompt contains anything TCC-unique it will fail in CMD.

Steve's right. And that's how it was for me for quite a while. But I used
CMD
so seldom it dodn't bother me much. Now I have a PROMPT command in CMD's
autorun file.

Has it ever been suggested that there be "Prompt=" and "TitlePrompt="
INI
directives (OPTION)? They could be overridden by environment variables
of the
same names for compatibility and special uses.

 

[vefatica]

On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:15:34 -0400, samintz <> wrote:

|Even still, when you launch CMD from a
|TCC window, CMD inherits TCC's environment. So invariably, I have
|to type PROMPT to restore the default prompt in CMD.

Not so. If CMD's autorun file (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command
Processor\AutoRun) does a "SET PROMPT=...", the user doesn't have to do it and
it's not propagated back to a parent TCC.

|My TCC prompt is:
|PROMPT=^e[37;@if[%@remote[%_disk] eq 0,42,41];1m[$P]$s
|
|Which is pretty cool in TCC but a bunch
|of gibberish in CMD.

I had forgotten ... a while back there was a discussion here about ANSICON. I
DL'd the source, simplified and modified it a bit, and built a DLL that could be
injected into CMD. My CMD autorun file is z:\windows\system32\cmdstart.bat (TCC
doesn't run it, an INI option) and it now contains (instead of a SET PROMPT
command)

d:\uty\injectdll.exe G:\Projects\ansi32dll\release\ANSI32.dll

This allows CMD to use my preferred prompt, which is

$e[32;1m$p$g$s$e[0m

It wouldn't like yours, though, with the @REMOTE variable function in it.

 

[clio]

I put CPU usage into my prompt :)

 

[ClioCJS]

The cursor stuff doesn't seem to work nowadays. At least not under Windows Terminal. Particularly not if you've used ANSI codes to set a cursor shape already, but I think anyway.

 

[rconn]

The cursor stuff doesn't seem to work nowadays. At least not under Windows Terminal. Particularly not if you've used ANSI codes to set a cursor shape already, but I think anyway.

A Windows Terminal issue, not TCC. WT is drawing the cursor and ignoring the one in the underlying console session.

 

[Charles Dye]

Windows Terminal does offer escape sequences to set the cursor shape. The bad news is, they don't really correspond to the different cursor sizes available in the traditional console window.

 

[vefatica]

Windows Terminal does offer escape sequences to set the cursor shape. The bad news is, they don't really correspond to the different cursor sizes available in the traditional console window.

How so? What can't you get in WT? You can get all these (also with escape sequences).

And you can set the height of the vintage cursor (as a percentage).

 

[Charles Dye]

I'm not finding anything about that vintage cursor on the page I linked. (Or the empty box or the double underscore, for that matter.) How would you select the vintage cursor or change its height with escape sequences? I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I'm not seeing it in the docs.

The vertical bar, and blinking vs. steady, look easily doable to me, but don't really fit the way ye olde console cursor worked. Rex might need to add a new .INI directive and rework the OPTION dialog a bit to accommodate them.

 

[vefatica]

^e[0 q will give the vintage cursor with the dialog-configured height. It used to be that an invalid parameter in DECSCUSR would give the vintage cursor. They considered that a bug and apparently changed the behavior.

I don't know about the feasibility of an INI directive. The cursor control sequences don't work in Win10's console (don't know about Win11's). They do work if TCC is using WT's OpenConsole.exe instead of conhost.exe. I'd replace conhost.exe if it weren't for the white scroll bars. What do you get in Win11 if you [path]\OpenConsole.exe [path]\tcc.exe?

 

[Charles Dye]

^e[0 q will give the vintage cursor with the dialog-configured height.

Here, it gives the blinking v-bar cursor. The docs say "the default cursor shape configured by the user"; mine is at the original system default of the blinking vertical bar. I don't think you can set all possible cursor shapes with escape sequences alone. Pity.

What do you get in Win11 if you [path]\OpenConsole.exe [path]\tcc.exe?

I mostly get access-denied errors...? There's one that came with Visual Studio that I can open that way.

 

[vefatica]

I guess "^e[0 q" gives whatever is console-configured rather than vintage.

Do you have WT as it comes with Win11? I've often wondered how it was changed and packaged for Win11. I have always used an unzip-only installation of WT. You can actually get it as a ZIPfile.

Does VS's OpenConsole give you white scroll bars? I suppose you've tried VS's built-in terminal. I found it rather goofy and haven't looked at it in a long time.

 

[Charles Dye]

Do you have WT as it comes with Win11? I've often wondered how it was changed and packaged for Win11. I have always used an unzip-only installation of WT. You can actually get it as a ZIPfile.

I think I installed both my copies from the Windows store, some time before I upgraded to Windows 11.

Does VS's OpenConsole give you white scroll bars? I suppose you've tried VS's built-in terminal. I found it rather goofy and haven't looked at it in a long time.

Looks an awful lot like the regular console to my uneducated eye.

 

[vefatica]

Hmmm! I get this. OpenConsole in the foreground, conhost in the background.

I wouldn't mind upgrading to Windows 11 but the last time I tried ...

1. I couldn't open PASSWORDS.DOCX (fairly important) because it was in use by some network (I don't have a network), and worse! ...

2. I couldn't print PDFs, but I could print everything else. That's really bad because I'm addicted to cryptic crosswords from The Times (of London).