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AH-TTY(1)              DragonFly General Commands Manual             AH-TTY(1)


NAME

       ah-tty - A Helpful Terminal


SYNOPSIS

       ah-tty


DESCRIPTION

       ah-tty provides context-sensitive help at a UNIX shell prompt.

       ah-tty executes an inferior shell, and watches the output from the
       shell and the input to it from the user carefully, to determine what is
       a prompt, and what is actually a command typed by the user.

       Once it has determined what the user's command is, it compares it to a
       list of rules to determine what helpful hint to display, if any.

       This isn't making sense, is it? Okay, try this:

       Start ah-tty, then at the shell prompt type "ls ", do not press return.
       Wait a moment, and watch the bottom of the screen.  Now does it make
       sense? Okay then.

       DO NOT set your default shell to ah-tty.  This is not a shell in its
       own right, just a kind of front-end shell watching thingy. If you want
       this to be your default shell, invoke it manually from the shell
       prompt, or in your .login or .profile scripts.

       Rules consist of regular expressions, combined with appropriate delays,
       as well as a maximum number of times the hint should be displayed in
       one session. However, any particular hint is only displayed once per
       prompt.

       For details of how to create and modify rules files, see RULES in the
       program distribution. If you can create rules files yourself, you don't
       need to use ah-tty :-)


FILES


              /usr/local/share/ah-tty.conf
                     Default system rules file.

              $HOME/.ah-ttyrc
                     Users' own rules files.


ENVIRONMENT


              PSHELL Determines the shell executed by ah-tty

              SHELL  Used if PSHELL is not set.


BUGS

       Does not handle terminal escape sequences, although any shell output
       using only normal printable ASCII, backspaces and BELL characters will
       be fine. Once it does, we can assume that it will understand the
       shell's line-editing capabilities. Right now it will still work, it
       just may not match correctly.


AUTHORS

       Randall Maas    <randym@acm.org>

       Fraser McCrossan <fraserm@gtn.net>

                         $Date: 2000/07/20 00:25:13 $                AH-TTY(1)

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