Software >

was silkscreen.sourceforge.net

A terminal multiplexer, something like GNU Screen having a baby with Emacs.

I tested this, but I couldn’t figure out what in the heck to do with it.

• 2022-10-16 – Abandoned

  • This appears to have been abandoned long ago, and later disowned completely.

• snapshot from 2007-01-03

MUD-style scripting of any textmode application ∞

From the author on the ruby-talk mailing list:

The first such application is a terminal emulator like GNU screen, so that you can run a shell.

And once you’re running a shell, you could Telnet to a MUD server.

I haven’t actually written any scripts in silkscreen yet, but it wouldn’t be much work to support an interface like:

TerminalWindow.add_line_callback { |window, line|
    if line =~ /you are hungry/
        window.insert_keypress("eat\n")
    end
}

A prospective user:

Wait a second.. does this mean that I could also have a shell and have MUD-style scripting functionality with any pure-text console application from Bash to .. anything?

His reply:

In essence, yes. And your scripts could do things like open other terminals and send keystrokes to them. Or add color to data as it goes by (like compiler output).

There are a couple caveats. It could be hard to set up the triggers you want, because your terminal doesn’t necessarily know what a “line” of input is. We can look for a “\n” in the input, but that might not always work. Consider an IRC client that has an area when you edit your text. When you hit “ENTER,” the client will send your text to the channel and clear the text area, but might never send a \n to the terminal. But you might be able to build some kind of heuristic that looks for outgoing “ENTER” keypresses.