NAME

ah-tty - A Helpful Terminal

SYNOPSIS

ah-tty

DESCRIPTION

ah-tty provides context-sensitive help at a UNIX shell prompt.

ah-tty executes an inferior shell, and watches the output from the shell and the input to it from the user carefully, to determine what is a prompt, and what is actually a command typed by the user.

Once it has determined what the user's command is, it compares it to a list of rules to determine what helpful hint to display, if any.

This isn't making sense, is it? Okay, try this:

Start ah-tty, then at the shell prompt type "ls ", do not press return. Wait a moment, and watch the bottom of the screen. Now does it make sense? Okay then.

DO NOT set your default shell to ah-tty. This is not a shell in its own right, just a kind of front-end shell watching thingy. If you want this to be your default shell, invoke it manually from the shell prompt, or in your .login or .profile scripts.

Rules consist of regular expressions, combined with appropriate delays, as well as a maximum number of times the hint should be displayed in one session. However, any particular hint is only displayed once per prompt.

For details of how to create and modify rules files, see RULES in the program distribution. If you can create rules files yourself, you don't need to use ah-tty :-)

FILES

/usr/local/share/ah-tty.conf: Default system rules file.
$HOME/.ah-ttyrc: Users' own rules files.

ENVIRONMENT

PSHELL: Determines the shell executed by ah-tty
SHELL: Used if PSHELL is not set.

BUGS

Does not handle terminal escape sequences, although any shell output using only normal printable ASCII, backspaces and BELL characters will be fine. Once it does, we can assume that it will understand the shell's line-editing capabilities. Right now it will still work, it just may not match correctly.

AUTHORS

Randall Maas <randym@acm.org>

Fraser McCrossan <fraserm@gtn.net>