Cobra Command Tool

Back in those old days (1990) the only terminal emulator window I had access to was cmdtool or shelltool. I guess xterm was around but I hadn't heard about it. cmdtool and shelltool did not offer anything more than a window to type commands in. The only difference between the two was that cmdtool had a scrolling window. I decided to build my own terminal emulator, Cobra Command Tool. I started with a plain cmdtool window and began adding new features.



1. A file tree browser.



The file tree browser lets you display as many file trees as you like. Files can be copied, moved, deleted, executed, linked and edited using only a few mouse clicks.

2. A menu to support a number of file operations in the file tree. A right-click will open the menu.



3. A file list browser.



When there are too many files in a directory a file list browser makes more sense. It also has a filter function that lets you filter out only the files you are interesting in.

4. A command list manager.



The command list manager lets you store all your "always forgot" commands. To execute a command double-click it.

5. Bookmarks.



The Bookmark Definition window lets you bookmark any directory, source file, executable file, script file, HTML file and PDF file. When selecting a bookmarked file the appropriate action will be taken. When selecting a directory bookmark a "cd" command will be executed.

6. User defined buttons.

Six buttons for the user to define an action to take place. See below.

7. A setup menu

All the setups defined in Cobra is stored in a setup file (.cobra-setup).



8. Full support for Clearcase and Subversion configuration management.



9. This is what came out of the remodeling process.



Still today I am using Cobra Command Tool for 95% of all the terminal work I do, but now the Linux or the Mac OS X version. If you would like to try it out go to the download page. Get the user's guide here. For instruction on how to install Cobra in Ubuntu 11.10 read my blog.