[Info-vax] Suggested DCL enhancement
IanD
iloveopenvms at gmail.com
Thu Nov 5 03:44:05 EST 2020
On Wednesday, November 4, 2020 at 12:40:53 AM UTC+11, Simon Clubley wrote:
> Here's an idea for a DCL enhancement: implement a control character that
> when typed causes DCL to dump all the valid options or keywords available
> at that point by reading from the CLD.
>
> For example, typing:
>
> $ show device <Ctrl-P>
>
> where <Ctrl-P> is the control character, would result in a list of all
> the qualifiers (along with any optional arguments to the qualifiers)
> that can be used at that point. The CLD format could also be enhanced
> with a single-line help text per qualifier that would also be displayed
> as part of the output.
>
> The output would also show that a parameter, labeled as (for example)
> "Device_Name", could be supplied at this point as well.
>
> Likewise, typing:
>
> $ show d<Ctrl-P>
>
> (with no space between the "d" and the Ctrl-P) would show all the valid
> options beginning with "d" at that point.
>
> Any comments ?
>
> Simon.
>
> --
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
> Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.
Next you'll be wanting command completion too!!! 😃
Nothing wrong with enhancements if the increases usability, productivity and reduces chances for errors/mistakes
Reminds me of when they added in place contextual menu options in Blender, it improved productively by orders of magnitude even though it was not a key feature request by a lot of people. It's all part of synergy in my opinion
For VMS the command line might not feature in the scope of the end user perhaps, but it certainly is used by application support folks, developers / system test case creators, dba's, troubleshooters etc
I suspect that to the degree that VMS is DevOps ready is inversely proportional to the amount of command line interaction that is required to maintain things and support applications
VMS is a long way off from the DevOps model, especially for infrastructure deployments and things like Chef, Ansible, Puppet and Terraform etc are possibly not even on the radar yet???
Nothing wrong with the idea although the engagement trigger will require serious thought (I know you know about cntrl P). Perhaps a double cntrl <key> combination might work?
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