A collection of tools for the terminal written in C. They are first and foremost aimed for the Windows platform.
This collection of tools for the Windows Command-Line is a small side-/hobby-project i wanted to do for quite a long time. I always felt sad about some funktionality which we can take for given when working on the terminal in other OS-es but are missing on Windows. Yes I know there is PowerShell and WSL and those are great, but I love to write native applications, especialy in C. Also, those tools work regardless of the used shell (cmd.exe, PowerShell).
Also those tools are not meant to be clones or re-implementations of other well-known applications, mostly from the Linux-World, but they are of course highly inspired by them. The implementations are as simple as possible, no fancy stuff if not ABSOLUTLY needed. Just no-nonsense get-the-job-done stuff...
Further Notes: I target the more recent versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server, and I don't test on older ones. So, if You really need dem to run on Windows XP or similar and they dont't, open a ticket and I will see what I can do for You 😉.
| NAME | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| pager | A terminal pager. More like less... |
| counter | Simple counter. Counts lines or words in text-files. |
| winfetch | Displays System-Information on the terminal. |
| timer | Measures duration of commands. |
| hashsum | Calculates Hash-Digests. |
The provided pre-compiled binaries on the releases-page are all 64-bit, if not mentoned otherwise. If You really need 32-bit binaries, You have to compile them yourself (see: Build).
To use them, just extract the ZIP-archive to a location of Your choice (suggestion: %USERPROFILE%\TermTools) and update Your Environment-Settings (see: Configure Environment after installing).
- Visual Studio 2019 (16.2.4) or
VC Build Tools 2019 (16.4.0) - GIT (obvously...)
Lower versions (should) work, but are not testet.
The edition of Visual Studio is not important, any will work.
PDCurses is included as a dependency inside of the CMake build-system. It get's cloned from GitHub automaticly when a build is started.
At first, clone the GitHub repository:
C:\> git clone https://github.com/holgerdoerner/TermTools.git
After that, start a Visual Studio Developer Prompt for your architecture with the batch-files of you Visual Studio installation, e.g:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat (for 64-bit)
or
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars86.bat (for 32-bit)
In the newly opened terminal, change to the directory where you cloned TermTools into:
C:\> cd <PATH_TO_LOCAL_TREE>\TermTools
C:\TermTools> build_cmake.bat
Whitch generates a 'Debug' configuration. To use a 'Release' configuration, run
C:\TermTools> build_cmake.bat Release
Now, when configuration finished without errors, you are in the build sub-directory of the source-tree. To compile just do a
C:\TermTools\build> nmake
( or )
C:\TermTools\build> nmake all
to compile all binaries, or pick one with
C:\TermTools\build> nmake <TARGET_NAME>
To get a list of available targets, type
C:\TermTools\build> nmake help
And to install the binaries do a
C:\TermTools\build> nmake install
Note: Install needs a 'Release'-configuration!
The default install_prefix is: %USERPROFILE%\TermTools.
It makes sense to be abele to call the tools anytime from a terminal. To do this You have to set a new Environment-Variable TERMTOOLS_HOME=%USERPROFILE%\TermTools and append TERMTOOLS_HOME to Your User-Path.
Because I like it, that's why!! I started programming back in the mid 90's lerning C on my own. Besides of that, it is an AWESOME language, and doesn't get the respect nowdays it realy deserves! It is a fast, get shit done language with no-nonsense (okay, almost).
I could have done that, but I have to work with this 'high-level' stuff day-to-day as an full-time developer. I do TermTools in my free time (so as the other stuff an my GitHub account), and in MY free time I like to use what's the most exciting and fun to me. Or stuff that teaches me new things. On the other hand, the most technologies today bring in A LOT of overhead, definetly too much for small applications like this.