Blog of an Ubuntu Community Member and FOSS developer

I was planning on this release being the final release for CLI Companion 1.0. However there were some bugs and features I felt we needed to address sooner rather then later. These resulted in some pretty big changes to the code so I thought we had better do one(1) more public release before the final release for the 1.0 series. This will help ensure the 1.0 stable release is fit to where the title, stable.

For those that do not know. CLI Companion is a Terminal with an attached Command List. It comes with a handful of commands to help new users get acquainted with the Terminal. It also allows you to save commands to the Command List for later use.

The changes in this release I think will greatly improve the usability of the application. One is the addition of the expander. The Command List can now be collapsed and expanded. This makes CLI Companion look and feel more like gnome-terminal when the command list is not in use. This makes the application much more usable as a daily terminal. The other big change is the reformatting of the way the application stores and uses commands. The old format was a bit limited, in that you could only put user input at the end of the command. So for example:
cat file1.txt file2.txt | sort | uniq > file3.txt
This command requires the user to enter three(3) file names at command runtime. They are not at the end of the command so this would not have worked in the old format. The new format uses question marks(?) as place holders for the variables defined in the ‘User Input’ column. So using the command above as an example, you would enter it into the ‘Add Command’ dialogue as:
cat ? ? | sort | uniq > ?
I realize some users may already have several commands saved in their Command List so the new config file is saved as ~/.clicomanion2 so as to not save over the old ~/.clicompanion file. I looked at different ways of ‘upgrading’ users .clicompanion file but none seemed practical. This means that any saved commands will have to be transferred manually.

Install
You can visit the projects Launchpad page or follow the directions below to install from the Terminal.

I will include include instructions to install the deb directly as well as instructions to install from the PPA so you can receive updates. You can install the deb with the following commands in a terminal.
To get the deb:
wget http://launchpad.net/clicompanion/1.0/1.0rc2/+download/clicompanion_1.0-3.1_all.deb

To install the deb:
dpkg -i clicompanion_1.0-3.1_all.deb

To automatically receive updates you can add the clicompanion-nightlies ppa to your Software Sources with the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:clicompanion-devs/clicompanion-nightlies

Then install the .deb (not necessary if you already followed the wget and dpkg commands above):
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install clicompanion