0.9.18 (October 1, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed bug introduced in 0.9.17 where help functions for hidden and disabled commands were not being filtered out as help topics
• Enhancements
  • AutoCompleter now handles argparse's mutually exclusive groups. It will not tab complete flag names or positionals for already completed groups. It also will print an error if you try tab completing a flag's value if the flag belongs to a completed group.
  • AutoCompleter now uses the passed-in parser's help formatter to generate hint text. This gives help and hint text for an argument consistent formatting.

0.9.17 (September 23, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed a bug when using WSL when all Windows paths have been removed from $PATH
  • Fixed a bug when running a cmd2 application on Linux without Gtk libraries installed
• Enhancements
  • No longer treating empty text scripts as an error condition
  • Allow dynamically extending a cmd2.Cmd object instance with a do_xxx method at runtime
  • Choices/Completer functions can now be passed a dictionary that maps command-line tokens to their argparse argument. This is helpful when one argument determines what is tab completed for another argument. If these functions have an argument called arg_tokens, then AutoCompleter will automatically pass this dictionary to them.
  • Added CompletionError class that can be raised during argparse-based tab completion and printed to the user
  • Added the following convenience methods
    • Cmd.in_script() - return whether a text script is running
    • Cmd.in_pyscript() - return whether a pyscript is running

0.9.16 (August 7, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed inconsistent parsing/tab completion behavior based on the value of allow_redirection. This flag is only meant to be a security setting that prevents redirection of stdout and should not alter parsing logic.
• Enhancements
  • Raise TypeError if trying to set choices/completions on argparse action that accepts no arguments
  • Create directory for the persistent history file if it does not already exist
  • Added set_choices_function(), set_choices_method(), set_completer_function(), and set_completer_method() to support cases where this functionality needs to be added to an argparse action outside of the normal parser.add_argument() call.
• Breaking Changes
  • Aliases and macros can no longer have the same name as a command

0.9.15 (July 24, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed exception caused by tab completing after an invalid subcommand was entered
  • Fixed bug where history -v was sometimes showing raw and expanded commands when they weren't different
  • Fixed bug where multiline commands were having leading and ending spaces stripped. This would mess up quoted strings that crossed multiple lines.
  • Fixed a bug when appending to the clipboard where contents were in reverse order
  • Fixed issue where run_pyscript failed if the script's filename had 2 or more consecutive spaces
  • Fixed issue where completer function of disabled command would still run
• Enhancements
  • Greatly simplified using argparse-based tab completion. The new interface is a complete overhaul that breaks the previous way of specifying completion and choices functions. See header of argparse_custom.py for more information.
  • Enabled tab completion on multiline commands
• Renamed Commands Notice
  • The following commands were renamed in the last release and have been removed in this release
    • load - replaced by run_script
    • _relative_load - replaced by _relative_run_script
    • pyscript - replaced by run_pyscript
  • We apologize for any inconvenience, but the new names are more self-descriptive
    • Lots of end users were confused particularly about what exactly load should be loading
• Breaking Changes
  • Restored cmd2.Cmd.statement_parser to be a public attribute (no underscore)
    • Since it can be useful for creating post-parsing hooks
  • Completely overhauled the interface for adding tab completion to argparse arguments. See enhancements for more details.
  • ACArgumentParser is now called Cmd2ArgumentParser
  • Moved basic_complete to utils.py
  • Made optional arguments on the following completer methods keyword-only: delimiter_complete, flag_based_complete, index_based_complete, path_complete, shell_cmd_complete
  • Renamed history option from --output-file to --output_file
  • Renamed matches_sort_key to default_sort_key. This value determines the default sort ordering of string results like alias, command, category, macro, settable, and shortcut names. Unsorted tab-completion results also are sorted with this key. Its default value (ALPHABETICAL_SORT_KEY) performs a case-insensitive alphabetical sort, but it can be changed to a natural sort by setting the value to NATURAL_SORT_KEY.
  • StatementParser now expects shortcuts to be passed in as dictionary. This eliminates the step of converting the shortcuts dictionary into a tuple before creating StatementParser.
  • Renamed Cmd.pyscript_name to Cmd.py_bridge_name
  • Renamed Cmd.pystate to Cmd.py_locals
  • Renamed PyscriptBridge to PyBridge

0.9.14 (June 29, 2019)

• Enhancements
  • Added support for and testing with Python 3.8, starting with 3.8 beta
  • Improved information displayed during transcript testing
  • Added ansi module with functions and constants to support ANSI escape sequences which are used for things like applying style to text
  • Added support for applying styles (color, bold, underline) to text via style() function in ansi module
  • Added default styles to ansi.py for printing success, warning. and error text. These are the styles used by cmd2 and can be overridden to match the color scheme of your application.
  • Added ansi_aware_write() function to ansi module. This function takes into account the value of allow_ansi to determine if ANSI escape sequences should be stripped when not writing to a tty. See documentation for more information on the allow_ansi setting.
• Breaking Changes
  • Python 3.4 reached its end of life on March 18, 2019 and is no longer supported by cmd2
    • If you need to use Python 3.4, you should pin your requirements to use cmd2 0.9.13
  • Made lots of changes to minimize the public API of the cmd2.Cmd class
    • Attributes and methods we do not intend to be public now all begin with an underscore
    • We make no API stability guarantees about these internal functions
  • Split perror into 2 functions:
    • perror - print a message to sys.stderr
    • pexcept - print Exception message to sys.stderr. If debug is true, print exception traceback if one exists
  • Signature of poutput and perror significantly changed
    • Removed color parameters color, err_color, and war_color from poutput and perror
      • See the docstrings of these methods or the cmd2 docs for more info on applying styles to output messages
    • end argument is now keyword-only and cannot be specified positionally
    • traceback_war no longer exists as an argument since it isn't needed now that perror and pexcept exist
  • Moved cmd2.Cmd.colors to ansi.py and renamed it to allow_ansi. This is now an application-wide setting.
  • Renamed the following constants and moved them to ansi.py
    • COLORS_ALWAYS --> ANSI_ALWAYS
    • COLORS_NEVER --> ANSI_NEVER
    • COLORS_TERMINAL --> ANSI_TERMINAL
• Renamed Commands Notice
  • The following commands have been renamed. The old names will be supported until the next release.
    • load --> run_script
    • _relative_load --> _relative_run_script
    • pyscript --> run_pyscript

0.9.13 (June 14, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed issue where the wrong terminator was being appended by Statement.expanded_command_line()
  • Fixed issue where aliases and macros could not contain terminator characters in their values
  • History now shows what was typed for macros and not the resolved value by default. This is consistent with the behavior of aliases. Use the expanded or verbose arguments to history to see the resolved value for the macro.
  • Fixed parsing issue in case where output redirection appears before a pipe. In that case, the pipe was given precedence even though it appeared later in the command.
  • Fixed issue where quotes around redirection file paths were being lost in Statement.expanded_command_line()
  • Fixed a bug in how line numbers were calculated for transcript testing
  • Fixed issue where _cmdloop() suppressed exceptions by returning from within its finally code
  • Fixed UnsupportedOperation on fileno error when a shell command was one of the commands run while generating a transcript
  • Fixed bug where history was displaying expanded multiline commands when -x was not specified
• Enhancements
  • Added capability to chain pipe commands and redirect their output (e.g. !ls -l | grep user | wc -l > out.txt)
  • pyscript limits a command's stdout capture to the same period that redirection does. Therefore output from a command's postparsing and finalization hooks isn't saved in the StdSim object.
  • StdSim.buffer.write() now flushes when the wrapped stream uses line buffering and the bytes being written contain a newline or carriage return. This helps when pyscript is echoing the output of a shell command since the output will print at the same frequency as when the command is run in a terminal.
  • ACArgumentParser no longer prints complete help text when a parsing error occurs since long help messages scroll the actual error message off the screen.
  • Exceptions occurring in tab completion functions are now printed to stderr before returning control back to readline. This makes debugging a lot easier since readline suppresses these exceptions.
  • Added support for custom Namespaces in the argparse decorators. See description of ns_provider argument for more information.
  • Transcript testing now sets the exit_code returned from cmdloop based on Success/Failure
  • The history of entered commands previously was saved using the readline persistence mechanism, and only persisted if you had readline installed. Now history is persisted independent of readline; user input from previous invocations of cmd2 based apps now shows in the history command.
  • Text scripts now run immediately instead of adding their commands to cmdqueue. This allows easy capture of the entire script's output.
  • Added member to CommandResult called stop which is the return value of onecmd_plus_hooks after it runs the given command line.
• Breaking changes
  • Replaced unquote_redirection_tokens() with unquote_specific_tokens(). This was to support the fix that allows terminators in alias and macro values.
  • Changed Statement.pipe_to to a string instead of a list
  • preserve_quotes is now a keyword-only argument in the argparse decorators
  • Refactored so that cmd2.Cmd.cmdloop() returns the exit_code instead of a call to sys.exit() It is now application developer's responsibility to treat the return value from cmdloop() accordingly
  • Only valid commands are persistent in history between invocations of cmd2 based apps. Previously all user input was persistent in history. If readline is installed, the history available with the up and down arrow keys (readline history) may not match that shown in the history command, because history only tracks valid input, while readline history captures all input.
  • History is now persisted in a binary format, not plain text format. Previous history files are destroyed on first launch of a cmd2 based app of version 0.9.13 or higher.
  • HistoryItem class is no longer a subclass of str. If you are directly accessing the .history attribute of a cmd2 based app, you will need to update your code to use .history.get(1).statement.raw instead.
  • Removed internally used eos command that was used to keep track of when a text script's commands ended
  • Removed cmd2 member called _STOP_AND_EXIT since it was just a boolean value that should always be True
  • Removed cmd2 member called _should_quit since PyscriptBridge now handles this logic
  • Removed support for cmd.cmdqueue
  • allow_cli_args is now an argument to init instead of a cmd2 class member
• Python 3.4 EOL notice
  • Python 3.4 reached its end of life on March 18, 2019
  • This is the last release of cmd2 which will support Python 3.4

0.9.12 (April 22, 2019) 🌍

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed a bug in how redirection and piping worked inside py or pyscript commands
  • Fixed bug in async_alert where it didn't account for prompts that contained newline characters
  • Fixed path completion case when CWD is just a slash. Relative path matches were incorrectly prepended with a slash.
• Enhancements
  • Added ability to include command name placeholders in the message printed when trying to run a disabled command.
    • See docstring for disable_command() or disable_category() for more details.
  • Added instance attributes to customize error messages without having to override methods. Theses messages can also be colored.
    • help_error - the error that prints when no help information can be found
    • default_error - the error that prints when a non-existent command is run
  • The with_argparser decorators now add the Statement object created when parsing the command line to the argparse.Namespace object they pass to the do_* methods. It is stored in an attribute called __statement__. This can be useful if a command function needs to know the command line for things like logging.
  • Added a -t option to the load command for automatically generating a transcript based on a script file
  • When in a pyscript, the stdout and stderr streams of shell commands and processes being piped to are now captured and included in the CommandResult structure.
• Potentially breaking changes
  • The following commands now write to stderr instead of stdout when printing an error. This will make catching errors easier in pyscript.
    • do_help() - when no help information can be found
    • default() - in all cases since this is called when an invalid command name is run
    • _report_disabled_command_usage() - in all cases since this is called when a disabled command is run
  • Removed *** from beginning of error messages printed by do_help() and default()
  • Significantly refactored cmd.Cmd class so that all class attributes got converted to instance attributes, also:
    • Added allow_redirection, terminators, multiline_commands, and shortcuts as optional arguments to cmd2.Cmd.__init__()
    • A few instance attributes were moved inside StatementParser and properties were created for accessing them
  • self.pipe_proc is now called self.cur_pipe_proc_reader and is a ProcReader class.
  • Shell commands and commands being piped to while in a pyscript will function as if their output is going to a pipe and not a tty. This was necessary to be able to capture their output.
  • Removed reserved_words class attribute due to lack of use
  • Removed keywords instance attribute due to lack of use

0.9.11 (March 13, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed bug in how history command deals with multiline commands when output to a script
  • Fixed a bug when the with_argument_list decorator is called with the optional preserve_quotes argument
  • Fix bug in perror() where it would try to print an exception Traceback even if none existed
• Enhancements
  • Improvements to the history command
    • Simplified the display format and made it more similar to bash
    • Added -x, --expanded flag
      • output expanded commands instead of entered command (expands aliases, macros, and shortcuts)
    • Added -v, --verbose flag
      • display history and include expanded commands if they differ from the typed command
    • Added support for negative indices
  • Added matches_sort_key to override the default way tab completion matches are sorted
  • Added StdSim.pause_storage member which when True will cause StdSim to not save the output sent to it. See documentation for CommandResult in pyscript_bridge.py for reasons pausing the storage can be useful.
  • Added ability to disable/enable individual commands and entire categories of commands. When a command is disabled, it will not show up in the help menu or tab complete. If a user tries to run the command or call help on it, a command-specific message supplied by the developer will be printed. The following commands were added to support this feature.
    • enable_command()
    • enable_category()
    • disable_command()
    • disable_category()
• Potentially breaking changes
  • Made cmd2_app a positional and required argument of AutoCompleter since certain functionality now requires that it can't be None.
  • AutoCompleter no longer assumes CompletionItem results are sorted. Therefore you should follow the cmd2 convention of setting self.matches_sorted to True before returning the results if you have already sorted the CompletionItem list. Otherwise it will be sorted using self.matches_sort_key.
  • Removed support for bash completion since this feature had slow performance. Also it relied on AutoCompleter which has since developed a dependency on cmd2 methods.
  • Removed ability to call commands in pyscript as if they were functions (e.g app.help()) in favor of only supporting one pyscript interface. This simplifies future maintenance.
  • No longer supporting C-style comments. Hash (#) is the only valid comment marker.
  • No longer supporting comments embedded in a command. Only command line input where the first non-whitespace character is a # will be treated as a comment. This means any # character appearing later in the command will be treated as a literal. The same applies to a # in the middle of a multiline command, even if it is the first character on a line.
    • # this is a comment
    • this # is not a comment

0.9.10 (February 22, 2019)

0.9.10 (February 22, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed unit test that hangs on Windows

0.9.9 (February 21, 2019)

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed bug where the set command was not tab completing from the current settable dictionary.
• Enhancements
  • Changed edit command to use do_shell() instead of calling os.system()