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This page is now obsolete; the best pages to look at is GettingStarted and ExtendingHotwire.

Historical content

Programming and Extending

The goal of Hotwire is more than just being a somewhat nicer interface for running system commands; the intent is to be a fully programmable and extensible shell using Python.

Learning Python

This tutorial assumes that you have a rudimentary familiarity with the Python programming langauge; if that's not the case, you can try The Python Tutorial. Note that tutorial assumes you're running it from a system terminal; you can do Ctrl-Shift-T to get one. However, you may also find Hotwire's builtin Python workpad to be useful (menu item Tools -> Python Workpad).

How Hotwire works

You've seen how Hotwire can display nicer icons for files and such; how does this work? The answer is that ls is a Hotwire builtin which doesn't output raw text; instead, it outputs FilePath objects. All hotwire commands are object pipelines.

For a better description of this, browse HotwireArchitecture.

At this point, you should be ready to code some Python.

Combining Hotwire pipelines with Python code

Type the following:

sleep 10000
proc
py

The py builtin is new - it allows you to manipulate the results of the current pipeline with arbitrary Python code.

You should have a sleep process running in the background, a list of processes displayed in the main window, and a new editor window, ready to accept Python code. Note here that Hotwire says:

# input type: <class 'hotwire.sysdep.proc.Process'>

This is telling us that our code is manipulating Process objects. As a first try, let's use the builtin outln function to print things to the output window:

for obj in curshell.get_current_output():
  outln(obj)

Now, press Control-Return (or Tools -> Eval ). You will currently get a text output window. There are plans to extend this so that you can get the same nice object display that pipelines typed in the main Hotwire window have.

Extending our code a bit to find our sleep process:

for obj in curshell.get_current_output():
  if obj.owner_name == 'walters' and obj.cmd.find('sleep') >= 0:
    outln(obj)

Be sure to change walters to your user name.

Of course, you aren't limited to just printing out things; you can type any Python code you can think of. For example, get a list, turn them all into uppercase, and write them to a file:

import tempfile
objs = map(lambda x: x.cmd.upper(), curshell.get_current_output())
(fd,tmppath) = tempfile.mkstemp('.tmp', 'hotwireout')
f = os.fdopen(fd, 'w')
for x in objs:
  f.write(x)
  f.write('\n')
f.close()
outln(tmppath)

Then press Control-Return again, and copy-paste the resulting filename back into the main Hotwire window, and type:

cat /tmp/hotwireout85So3e.tmp

Extending Hotwire

Ready to move on to ExtendingHotwire with permanent Python code?