Hotwire 0.700 now released

["Colin Walters" <cgwalters gmail com>]

Hello world,

Hotwire 0.700 is available.  This is a major release.  Hotwire has
transitioned to its first alpha version; while it is still in
development and a number of things may change, it is expected that
significantly more people will find it to be a compelling replacement
for terminal+shell.

One thing worth mentioning at the start here is that there is now real
content at the website: http://hotwire-shell.org
(Rather than just being a redirect to the wiki on Google Code).

* Source Download link:
http://hotwire-shell.googlecode.com/files/hotwire-0.700.zip
* Changes: http://code.google.com/p/hotwire-shell/wiki/HotwireChanges#Changes_in_Hotwire_0.700_(Current_Release)

* What is Hotwire:
Hotwire is an object-oriented hypershell. It is a shell designed for
systems programming (files, processes), and thus it is in the same
conceptual category of software as the Unix shell+terminal and Windows
PowerShell.  The goal of the Hotwire project though is to create a
better systems programming shell than both Unix and PowerShell. We
call it a hyper-shell because Hotwire blends the concepts of a
systems-oriented shell with a modern graphical user interface display.

* Changes copy/paste from wiki:

The project has expanded in scope slightly; Hotwire now includes
application-specific terminal containers. Currently there are separate
hotwire-ssh and a hotwire-sudo executables which have app-specific
menu items and other features (e.g. hotwire-ssh has "New tab for
connection" and "Open SFTP" options). Note in Hotwire ssh is by
default aliased to hotwire-ssh and likewise for sudo; you can also use
these independently of Hotwire in a legacy Unix terminal+shell as
well.

There are a few major changes to the core which bear longer
explanation. First, Hotwire is now a multi-language shell. The old
language is replaced by a rewritten "HotwirePipe" language. It
supports the object-oriented pipeline, and has also gained file I/O
redirection - crucially, HotwirePipe no longer involves processing
through /bin/sh for system commands. Hotwire now also supports
directly entering Python expressions and evaluating them in the shell,
and visualizing their values. In addition, Hotwire now has a syntax
for executing code in other programming languages like Perl and Ruby
using their external interpeters in a convenient syntax.

Second, many will be happy to discover the completion system has been
entirely replaced and is now more bash-like; this closes a swath of
issues ( issue 12 ,  issue 16 ,  issue 25 ,  issue 27 ). Your key
habits will have to be relearned, but this should be for the better.

Another project-wide change is that the execution core and underlying
libraries have been relicensed to a permissive MIT-style license (the
user interface remains GPL). This change was made with an eye to
eventually including in the main Python distribution parts of the
Hotwire core as an embedded system scripting language, as well as
libraries such as Process enumeration.

Finally, Hotwire now runs again on Python 2.4, and should have
improved compatibility with earlier GTK+/GNOME releases.

Visible Changes:

    * New pipeline class inspector sidebar, as well as object inspector window
    * History search is now on Ctrl-r
    * Completion status waits for a typing pause before appearing
    * Support for changing EDITOR used in environment (Preferences->Editor)
    * "View->To Window" menu item is now "File->Detach Tab"
    * New "Detach Command" menu item in Hotwire mode detaches just a
single command (e.g. create a new window with just your make output)
    * Add "Quick Switch" dialog for searching most-used directories
    * Added popup menu on command headers
    * Unicode renderer wraps lines by default (right click to unset)
    * Unicode renderer has extended popup menu items
    * File renderer now supports interactive search
    * File context menu has icons for application launchers
    * "Move to Trash" context menuitem is replaced with more general
"Copy Path to Input"
    * Added Back/Forward buttons and a "Go" menu ( issue 57 )
    * Added "Remove Pipeline" menu item (with matching Undo support)
    * Command garbage collection is based on view time, not completion time
    * Support for bookmarking directories (using .gtk-bookmarks)
    * Added Fullscreen menu item
    * New selection builtin which outputs currently selected objects
    * ed launches your $EDITOR, not desktop environment text/plain editor
    * ls builtin outputs File objects, not FilePath
    * Removed Python Workpad; it is replaced by "py-eval -f".
    * New py-map builtin for processing using Python expression
    * New py-filter builtin allows filtering using Python expression
    * New walk builtin which recurses a directory yielding File objects
    * New http-get builtin does an HTTP GET and returns an HTTPResponse object
    * New replace builtin (Kevin Kubasik)
    * New setenv builtin
    * HotwireEdit supports "Save as", syntax highlighting, inline search
    * Use Unix filesystem backend on FreeBSD.
    * More default term commands: ipython
    * Cancel now sends SIGTERM rather than SIGINT
    * help shows installed languages
    * help shows both builtin alias names, and textual alias expansion
    * help has hyperlinks to launch inspector for relevant objects

Notable Bugfixes:

    * Some memory leaks plugged
    * Automatically enter password mode if pty echo is off (fixes passwd)
    * Correctly set controlling TTY, makes gpg happy ( issue 30 ,  issue 65 )
    * Ctrl-s starts search for File renderer
    * Fix proc on win32 (Suggested fix from tianxiaoji)