[gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[tuxic]

Hi

I am currently exploring Mecrisp-Stellaris FORTH on a STM32F103C8 uC.

To communicate with the FORTH-system I use a serlal terminal console
like picocom.

Since I am still learning this quirky though fascinating language I
really would appreciate a commandline history.

For that I tried picocom and picocom with rlfe / rlwrap, neocon,
screen, tio.

None worked and/or has a fixed handling of CR<=>LF, which leads
to an
     ugly
         output.

Is there any serial terminal/console (no gui), which has a command
history of some sort and a configurable handling of cr<=>lf?

Thanks for any help in advance -- the FORTH will be with you!
Cheers
Meino

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 11:39 AM, tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> I am currently exploring Mecrisp-Stellaris FORTH on a STM32F103C8 uC.

#learningIsFun

> To communicate with the FORTH-system I use a serlal terminal console 
> like picocom.

Okay.

> Since I am still learning this quirky though fascinating language I 
> really would appreciate a commandline history.

Understandable.

> For that I tried picocom and picocom with rlfe / rlwrap, neocon, 
> screen, tio.

I doubt it will make any difference, but you might also try minicom, 
putty, and cu.  You might even be able to get Bash (et al) talk to the 
serial terminal.

> None worked and/or has a fixed handling of CR<=>LF, which leads 
> to an 
>      ugly 
>          output.

ACK

> Is there any serial terminal/console (no gui), which has a command 
> history of some sort and a configurable handling of cr<=>lf?

I would be somewhat surprised if there was.  But only somewhat as there 
are a lot of different terminal (emulators) that have even more features.

Remember, that the job of the terminal (emulator) is to display text 
from the connected device and send input to the connected device.  — 
There's even room for debate about if the terminal (emulator) should 
display characters that are typed (a.k.a. local echo) or if the remote 
system should need to send them back for display (non-local / remote echo).

It sounds like you're wanting to go above and beyond this and have the 
terminal introduce some intelligence into the mix and add (basic) line 
editing capabilities and history.

Such seems like it could be possible to do.  But it also seems beyond a 
basic terminal (emulator) and gets into more of a smart application that 
you interact with in one way and it interacts with the serial device in 
another / different way.

The closest I've come to things like this is using xdotool to send 
commands from one xterm to another.  I could see how you could have a 
(prefix) command that you run that sends the actual command to another 
window.  That way you could leverage the full history and command line 
editor of the terminal (emulator) that you're using.  Granted, this 
would be two windows that you would need to use jointly and in close 
concert with each other.

There may be other ways to take the output from the remote window and 
display it locally, thus sort of providing the ability to hide the 
second / remote window.  But I have no idea how to go about this.

I can see how you might end up with something where you have a big 
window (132x50) for output and another smaller window (132x10) below it 
(I'd try to align them) that is used for input.  It would be reminiscent 
of older mainframe / AS/400 terminals where you have one command line 
and all output comes out above, including a copy of the command entered.

Anyway....

I don't know of any examples of what you're asking for.  There may be a 
super fancy terminal (emulator) that will do what you want.  ProComm 
(Plus) and SecureCRT come to mind.  But they're GUIs.

Random thought:  I have no idea if Plan9's terminal emulator has any 
features for this or not.  It may be worth looking at.  I believe it's 
been ported to Linux.

> Thanks for any help in advance -- the FORTH will be with you!

Good luck.

Please share if you find anything.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 11:54 AM, Grant Taylor wrote:
> Random thought:  I have no idea if Plan9's terminal emulator has any 
> features for this or not.  It may be worth looking at.  I believe it's 
> been ported to Linux.

You might also want to check out using vim or emacs as they have 
terminal emulators built in.  They might be able to apply some command 
line history / editing (in a round about way).



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-05-22 12:00, Grant Taylor wrote:

> You might also want to check out using vim or emacs as they have
> terminal emulators built in.  They might be able to apply some command
> line history / editing (in a round about way).

Indeed, if there isn't a prepackaged way the next easiest is probably
customizing emacs "comint" mode (which is the base mode behind shell
mode and various other specialized interpreter modes).

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Håkon Alstadheim]

Den 22. mai 2018 20:28, skrev Ian Zimmerman:
> On 2018-05-22 12:00, Grant Taylor wrote:
>
>> You might also want to check out using vim or emacs as they have
>> terminal emulators built in.  They might be able to apply some command
>> line history / editing (in a round about way).
> Indeed, if there isn't a prepackaged way the next easiest is probably
> customizing emacs "comint" mode (which is the base mode behind shell
> mode and various other specialized interpreter modes).
>
Second that, use emacs. Basically you just need to teach emacs to
recognize the prompt. Most likely it will already work.

There are at least three ways to use emacs for this. The best would be
to run emacs on your local machine and then M-x serial-term or M-x
shell. ('M' stands for meta, usually means you can push the 'alt' key
together with a letter, but there are other ways if you have no alt key,
like on a serial connection) . Third way would be to run emacs in text
mode on the remote machine. If you have ssh running on the remote
machine, check out the "tramp" package in emacs.

With no gui, you would need to learn the old tty-commands in emacs, like
push <esc> followed by 'x' instead of using ALT-x, but it should all be
there.

Pro-tip: if running emacs on the remote machine, make sure your
terminal-connection does not interpret Control-S as a STOP signal, i.e.
anything to do with XON/XOFF you do NOT want enabled in your
shell-connection.

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 01:00 PM, Håkon Alstadheim wrote:
> Pro-tip: if running emacs on the remote machine, make sure your 
> terminal-connection does not interpret Control-S as a STOP signal, 
> i.e.  anything to do with XON/XOFF you do NOT want enabled in your 
> shell-connection.

Just to clarify, this is a client side terminal (emulator) setting / 
function and not an aspect of an 8 bit clean communications path.

If you used something that relied on the ~ (tilde) character, you may 
need to disable command interception in your ssh client or change the 
character.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[David M. Fellows]

>Hi
>
>I am currently exploring Mecrisp-Stellaris FORTH on a STM32F103C8 uC.
>
>To communicate with the FORTH-system I use a serlal terminal console
>like picocom.
>
>Since I am still learning this quirky though fascinating language I
>really would appreciate a commandline history.
>
>For that I tried picocom and picocom with rlfe / rlwrap, neocon,
>screen, tio.
>
>None worked and/or has a fixed handling of CR<=>LF, which leads
>to an
>     ugly
>         output.
>
>Is there any serial terminal/console (no gui), which has a command
>history of some sort and a configurable handling of cr<=>lf?

Since you want to blast to the past... kermit may do what you need. Back
in the day it connected everything to everything.
See http://www.kermitproject.org/
emerge ckermit.

expect might also be twisted to do what you need. It is also in portage.
DaveF
>
>Thanks for any help in advance -- the FORTH will be with you!
>Cheers
>Meino
>
>
>

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 12:45 PM, David M. Fellows wrote:
> Since you want to blast to the past... kermit may do what you 
> need. Back in the day it connected everything to everything. 
> See http://www.kermitproject.org/ emerge ckermit.

Are you advocating kermit as a protocol or as a terminal (emulator) client?

> expect might also be twisted to do what you need. It is also in portage.

~shudder~



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2018-05-22, Grant Taylor <gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
> On 05/22/2018 12:45 PM, David M. Fellows wrote:
>> Since you want to blast to the past... kermit may do what you 
>> need. Back in the day it connected everything to everything. 
>> See http://www.kermitproject.org/ emerge ckermit.
>
> Are you advocating kermit as a protocol or as a terminal (emulator) client?

Just to be pedantic, ckermit isn't a terminal emulator.  It's a serial
comm package that will connect a serial port to whatever terminal/tty
you used to run the ckermit command.  It's also a file transfer
protocol, but that's pretty much irrelevant for this thread.

I use ckermit every day, but have never tried to wrap it with either
of the aforementioned readline utilities (the things I connect to have
their own command line history/editing facilities).

-- 
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                                  at               lease!!
                              gmail.com            

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 02:39 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:
> Just to be pedantic, ckermit isn't a terminal emulator.  It's a serial 
> comm package that will connect a serial port to whatever terminal/tty 
> you used to run the ckermit command.  It's also a file transfer protocol, 
> but that's pretty much irrelevant for this thread.

Duly noted.  I suspect that minicom, cu, and putty-link (?) also qualify 
the same way.

Conversely, XTerm, Gnome-Term, PuTTY, Datastorm ProComm, Vandyke 
(Secure)CRT, and Hummingbird Host Explorer are all true terminal 
emulators as they are GUI applications that display text.

> I use ckermit every day, but have never tried to wrap it with either 
> of the aforementioned readline utilities (the things I connect to have 
> their own command line history/editing facilities).

Interesting.  Can I ask more about what your use case is?



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2018-05-22, Grant Taylor <gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
> On 05/22/2018 02:39 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> Just to be pedantic, ckermit isn't a terminal emulator.  It's a serial 
>> comm package that will connect a serial port to whatever terminal/tty 
>> you used to run the ckermit command.  It's also a file transfer protocol, 
>> but that's pretty much irrelevant for this thread.
>
> Duly noted.  I suspect that minicom, cu, and putty-link (?) also qualify 
> the same way.

Yes for cu and (I think) plink.  IIRC, minicom actually _is_ a
terminal emulator.  It emulates an ANSI/VT100 terminal inside whatever
text-mode terminal you run it from.

> Conversely, XTerm, Gnome-Term, PuTTY, Datastorm ProComm, Vandyke 
> (Secure)CRT, and Hummingbird Host Explorer are all true terminal 
> emulators as they are GUI applications that display text.

There are also text-mode terminal emulators.  You can run screen or
minicom from any terminal supported by your system's termcap/terminfo
library, but whatever is connected to screen/minicom thinks it is
talking to an ANSI terminal.

>> I use ckermit every day, but have never tried to wrap it with either 
>> of the aforementioned readline utilities (the things I connect to have 
>> their own command line history/editing facilities).
>
> Interesting.  Can I ask more about what your use case is?

Connecting urxvt instances to physical serial ports which are
connected to physical serial ports on various embedded systems where
I'm developing and testing firmware.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! The PILLSBURY DOUGHBOY
                                  at               is CRYING for an END to
                              gmail.com            BURT REYNOLDS movies!!

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[David M. Fellows]

>On 05/22/2018 12:45 PM, David M. Fellows wrote:
>> Since you want to blast to the past... kermit may do what you 
>> need. Back in the day it connected everything to everything. 
>> See http://www.kermitproject.org/ emerge ckermit.
>
>Are you advocating kermit as a protocol or as a terminal (emulator) client?
As a terminal emulator that has a lot of configurabilty.
>
>> expect might also be twisted to do what you need. It is also in portage.
>
>~shudder~
Yes, but.. you can do some neat things with it.

DaveF

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 03:06 PM, David M. Fellows wrote:
> As a terminal emulator that has a lot of configurabilty.

I'm quite curious what sort of configuration you use in (what I 
understand to be) a text based communications package in your day to day 
activities.

I do so much via SSH that I don't even think of anything other than 
XTerm and SSH.

Please enlighten me to what I might be missing.

> Yes, but.. you can do some neat things with it.

<monotone>ya...</monotone>

I know.

I'm thinking about something that is very much so expect adjacent.

I agree that expect does have it's use cases, and that very little else 
will do when you truly need it.

I ran in to too many people that would try to do things like use expect 
to call commands to create users and deal with the failure cases instead 
of actually looking to see if the user existed first.  Read: expect was 
the wrong tool for that job.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[R0b0t1]

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 12:39 PM,  <tuxic@posteo.de> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I am currently exploring Mecrisp-Stellaris FORTH on a STM32F103C8 uC.
>
> To communicate with the FORTH-system I use a serlal terminal console
> like picocom.
>
> Since I am still learning this quirky though fascinating language I
> really would appreciate a commandline history.
>
> For that I tried picocom and picocom with rlfe / rlwrap, neocon,
> screen, tio.
>
> None worked and/or has a fixed handling of CR<=>LF, which leads
> to an
>      ugly
>          output.
>
> Is there any serial terminal/console (no gui), which has a command
> history of some sort and a configurable handling of cr<=>lf?
>
> Thanks for any help in advance -- the FORTH will be with you!
> Cheers
> Meino
>

Have you tried screen? It may have more features than kermit by
default, but it is intended for speaking with "smart" terminal devices
and will do lots of input processing.

Based on your description of the problem you may want this?

Cheers,
     R0b0t1

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 02:43 PM, R0b0t1 wrote:
> Have you tried screen? It may have more features than kermit by default, 
> but it is intended for speaking with "smart" terminal devices and will 
> do lots of input processing.

Are you saying that screen (and possibly tmux, etc.) have the ability to 
inject something like history and command line editing?

I thought that they basically kept track of multiple TTYs (PTYs) and did 
some intelligent shuffling between them and / or copying & pasting of 
content therein.  That seems significantly different than introducing 
something like readline / rlwrap like functionality.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[R0b0t1]

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 4:03 PM, Grant Taylor
<gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
> On 05/22/2018 02:43 PM, R0b0t1 wrote:
>>
>> Have you tried screen? It may have more features than kermit by default,
>> but it is intended for speaking with "smart" terminal devices and will do
>> lots of input processing.
>
>
> Are you saying that screen (and possibly tmux, etc.) have the ability to
> inject something like history and command line editing?
>
> I thought that they basically kept track of multiple TTYs (PTYs) and did
> some intelligent shuffling between them and / or copying & pasting of
> content therein.  That seems significantly different than introducing
> something like readline / rlwrap like functionality.
>

Yes - screen *can* hold everything until you hit enter and allow you
to edit the line and do wrapping clientside. Screen also handles
control codes properly.

I just tried to find the exact settings but drew a blank. It doesn't
do local line editing by default. Local editing should be okay with a
normal device but it will not work well if your board runs Linux.

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 03:44 PM, R0b0t1 wrote:
> Yes - screen can hold everything until you hit enter and allow you to 
> edit the line and do wrapping clientside. Screen also handles control 
> codes properly.

Good to know.

Aside:  Now my brain is trying to remember the old differences between 
telnet and 3270 / 5250.  I think that telnet was inherently line 
oriented (by default) and 3270 / 5250 were something else (but I don't 
remember what).

> I just tried to find the exact settings but drew a blank. It doesn't 
> do local line editing by default. Local editing should be okay with a 
> normal device but it will not work well if your board runs Linux.

The other thing that comes to mind is mosh and some of the features that 
it has.

Though, all of those don't do anything like command history.  (I'm 
assuming that editing is limited to the current, unsent, command line.)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2018-05-22, Grant Taylor <gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net> wrote:

> Aside:  Now my brain is trying to remember the old differences between 
> telnet and 3270 / 5250.  I think that telnet was inherently line 
> oriented (by default) and 3270 / 5250 were something else (but I don't 
> remember what).

The 3270 was completely screen-oriented.  An entire screen was loaded
from the host.  That screen included fields with various attributes
(e.g. editable vs. read-only).  You could edit whatever was editable
on the screen, and then when you hit "submit" the entire screen was
sent to the host (there may have been an option to send only edited or
editable fields, I don't remember the details).  IOW, it worked
vaguely like an HTML page containing a form.  Except there were
various entertaining ways things went wrong that don't happen with an
HTML form.  IIRC, if you inserted too much data into an improperly
defined field, it could shift everything below it and muck up all the
rest of the fields.  I also seem to recall sometimes being able to
edit fields that weren't really supposed to be editable, and then
hilarity ensued when you hit submit.

Though I did actually use some genuine IBM green-screen "3270-like"
terminals, most of my experience was with 3270 emulators running under
X11 -- so some of the fun was probably caused by bugs in the
emulators.

-- 
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                                  at               I'M SHAVING!!
                              gmail.com            

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 05:12 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:
> The 3270 was completely screen-oriented.  An entire screen was loaded 
> from the host.  That screen included fields with various attributes 
> (e.g. editable vs. read-only).  You could edit whatever was editable on 
> the screen, and then when you hit "submit" the entire screen was sent to 
> the host (there may have been an option to send only edited or editable 
> fields, I don't remember the details).  IOW, it worked vaguely like an 
> HTML page containing a form.  Except there were various entertaining 
> ways things went wrong that don't happen with an HTML form.  IIRC, if 
> you inserted too much data into an improperly defined field, it could 
> shift everything below it and muck up all the rest of the fields.  I also 
> seem to recall sometimes being able to edit fields that weren't really 
> supposed to be editable, and then hilarity ensued when you hit submit.

I should have known / remembered that 3270 was screen oriented.

I've made the comparison to HTML forms multiple times myself.

Ya, the editable / non-editable setting was sent by the host and it 
trusted that the client would not much with them.  A number of mainframe 
hackers have leveraged this (mis)feature before.

Some of the fields are similar to hidden fields in HTML forms.

> Though I did actually use some genuine IBM green-screen "3270-like" 
> terminals, most of my experience was with 3270 emulators running under 
> X11 -- so some of the fun was probably caused by bugs in the emulators.

Yep.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[tuxic]

On 05/22 03:43, R0b0t1 wrote:
> On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 12:39 PM,  <tuxic@posteo.de> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I am currently exploring Mecrisp-Stellaris FORTH on a STM32F103C8 uC.
> >
> > To communicate with the FORTH-system I use a serlal terminal console
> > like picocom.
> >
> > Since I am still learning this quirky though fascinating language I
> > really would appreciate a commandline history.
> >
> > For that I tried picocom and picocom with rlfe / rlwrap, neocon,
> > screen, tio.
> >
> > None worked and/or has a fixed handling of CR<=>LF, which leads
> > to an
> >      ugly
> >          output.
> >
> > Is there any serial terminal/console (no gui), which has a command
> > history of some sort and a configurable handling of cr<=>lf?
> >
> > Thanks for any help in advance -- the FORTH will be with you!
> > Cheers
> > Meino
> >
> 
> Have you tried screen? It may have more features than kermit by
> default, but it is intended for speaking with "smart" terminal devices
> and will do lots of input processing.
> 
> Based on your description of the problem you may want this?
> 
> Cheers,
>      R0b0t1
> 


Hi all,

tahnks a lot for the huge and overwelming amount of posts. help and
opinion about things of the past and the present.

I have to apologise: I overlooked a certain option of rlwrap:

  rlwrap -a picocom -b 115200 --imap lfcrlf,crcrlf -s /usr/local/bin/msend /dev/ttyACM0

or

  rlwrap -a tio -b 115200 -d 8 -s 1 -p none -m INLCRNL /dev/ttyACM0

or similiar does the job perfectly.

Cheers!
Meino

PS: I also checked screen (no crlf handling), putty (has a gui and
minimal configuration possibilities for serial connections and bunch
more...)

Re: [gentoo-user] Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/22/2018 07:33 PM, tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> putty (has a gui and minimal configuration possibilities for serial 
> connections and bunch more...)

plink is the command line / text equivalent of PuTTY, from the same authors.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[gentoo-user] Re: Console serial terminal/console with command history?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2018-05-23, tuxic@posteo.de <tuxic@posteo.de> wrote:

> I have to apologise: I overlooked a certain option of rlwrap:
>
>   rlwrap -a picocom -b 115200 --imap lfcrlf,crcrlf -s /usr/local/bin/msend /dev/ttyACM0
>
> or
>
>   rlwrap -a tio -b 115200 -d 8 -s 1 -p none -m INLCRNL /dev/ttyACM0
>
> or similiar does the job perfectly.

Brilliant!

Thanks for following up with the solution.  After decades of using
serial ports on Linux, I still didn't know about picocom or tio.  I'll
make a note of them and how to use them with rlwrap!

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! Those people look
                                  at               exactly like Donnie and
                              gmail.com            Marie Osmond!!