Supershell (Windows XP, VB)

From: democratix (demokratix_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/19/04 

Date: 18 Nov 2004 19:35:08 -0800

Most shells were written in a time where:
1) The internet wasn't especially prevalent
2) Neither were graphical interfaces (not like today, anyway)
3) The computer's time (and processing power) was much more expensive
than yours.

(note at this point, I'm not selling anything, you are free to
download the software I'm talking about, and its vb source...)

These days one can make a more flexible and powerful shell. For
example, I use one at work which I made just to save time for common
tasks, but has grown into an extremely versatile little app (and does
indeed save a lot of time for common tasks).

The chief benefits are as follows:

Firsty, you can set focus to it at any time by pressing
ctrl+windows-button, or in other words, the first two keys on the
keyboard at the bottom. This is most handy (no pun intended), since
you don't have to look or think beyond "need to type a command", or
move your hand to the mouse if you're already typing, just press
ctrl+windows and type the command. Focus is set to whatever program
the command-parser (shell) launches in response to your command.

Secondly, commands it can accept include:

:> define constabulary (takes you to a dictionary site, to the search
result for the specified word)
:> google pda technology (Will do the obvious, search google for:
pda technology, and load the results in your web browser.)
:> google pda-technolohy (Same but searches for the exact phrase)
:> google news pda technology
:> google groups pda technolgy
:> google images pda technology
:> google directory pda technology
(Search the various google service for whatever you enter).
(Incidentally, If you use firefox - which i highly recommend - and
have its tabbed browsing preferences set up right, each new web page
this command parser launches will be in a new tab of the existing
window, which is quite cool, and prevents clutter.)
:> logoff
:> shutdown
:> restart
(control your computer/windows)
:> \ (opens the hard drive root folder, ie c:\)
:> \some path\within\c drive (as you'd expect)
:> / (opens the root folder of your web server)
:> /database/library (opens the specified folder underneath the
web-server root folder)
:> \\computername (loads a computer on your network into explorer)
:> http://this_will_be_treated_as_url
:> a (opens the floppy disk in explorer)
:> d (opens the first cd drive in explorer, any drive letter works
of course, if it exists)
:> my documents
:> my computer
:> my music
(as you'd expect)
:> cmd (or "command", "dos", loads the windows command prompt)
:> apache config (opens the httpd.conf for editing)
:> apache control (opens the start-menu folder that has the apache
controls)
:> wiki dirac (looks up the topic "dirac" in the wikipedia, also:
"wikipedia searchstring" works the same)
:> sourceforge dirac (finds the dirac project on sourceforge)
:> comp.programming (opens the newsgroup in google groups)
:> anywebsitethatendsinacommonsuffix.com
(if it finds .com .net or a bunch of others, after ruling the
possibility that it's one of the preset commands, it will assume it's
a web url and load it accordingly)
:> edit anything_other_than_self.txt (opens a text file for editing)
:> edit self (opens the vb source project for the program itself)

There's plenty more but you get the idea. Also its very easy to
customise.

Anyway, if you've got vb, and want to use something like this, it
should take you about a minute to see how the thing works (to the
point you can add/modify commands), and then maybe 5-10 minutes to
change the path constants and commands to suit your computer's setup.
Then you're pretty much set.

Feel free to download the source and executable from my website (it's
only 25kb). If you have questions, post them to the thread, if you
want to contribute/suggest changes, may as well post to the thread as
well, on the off chance other people are interested.

http://geocities.com/christhomsonspage/command_parser/

Feedback, suggestions, and pointers to similar projects that exist,
are most welcome.

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