Commander X16

I just started playing around with the emulator about an hour ago.  On feature it lacks IMHO is a command buffer.

It would be nice to be able to hit tab or something similar to bring up the last command issued.  You can see what I mean by looking at the following image where I press UP to get the last command.

Tab or Shift Tab  or Shift Up.   This would be amazing

 

Well, it's using a full-screen editor. You can move the cursor up a few lines and press return again to run the command on that line again.

It's not as convenient perhaps but it sort of works.

Well, it sort of does. If the command is still on screen, you can just cursor up to it and hit return again. You can even overwrite part of it, if necessary. This behavior goes back at least to the C64.

like in linux command line or dos? up arrow gives command history.

Welcome to 1982 ?  In best old man voice:  "In MY day, we didn't have command buffers!  We retyped or we cursored back and hit enter on it again!  We didn't care there was other stuff on the screen!  And we liked it!

It isn't a shell-style interface, though.

On 2/24/2021 at 5:51 PM, x16tial said:

Welcome to 1982 ?  In best old man voice:  "In MY day, we didn't have command buffers!  We retyped or we cursored back and hit enter on it again!  We didn't care there was other stuff on the screen!  And we liked it!

This.  QFT.

 

But I'll think about it if I ever get back to my 8SH code... a history function.  I'd probably use one RAM buffer for it... that's EIGHT THOUSAND BYTES of history!!  WOW!

 

On 2/24/2021 at 3:51 PM, x16tial said:

Welcome to 1982 ?  In best old man voice:  "In MY day, we didn't have command buffers!  We retyped or we cursored back and hit enter on it again!  We didn't care there was other stuff on the screen!  And we liked it!

I was using a C=64 back in 1982 (I was 12), I am and old man also.  But seriously something like this would be an awesome feature.   But if not, I can live with that too.

I'm going to go with my usual answer: 

Write one.

If it's super useful, it might be worth including in the ROM, but you'd have talk the team into accepting it, then you'd have to do the work and submit a pull request for that. 

Even if it doesn't get put in the ROM, you could load it into the $400 block and run it as a memory resident routine, and some other people might also find it useful. 

Personally, the more I look at the Commander's design, the more I wish it was built like a CP/M or DOS machine, with nothing in ROM but a BIOS, so we could design our own interpreters and command shells. But since 16K of address space is permanently ROM, we are losing a pretty big chunk of memory that could house a custom operating system and tools like yours. 

In his last video, talking about the motherboard upgrades, Kevin did mention that space could have RAM alongside the ROM, so I'm crossing my fingers that we might get some room for RAM next to the KERNAL banks. Even if that's left empty, users could install their own RAM and use that for custom operating system code.