Terminus, a Guildhall tools applet

showing the first two commands Terminus ever ran

Everybody has a shell. Text driven consoles are really convenient for configuration and debugging, information mining, or as a last repository for some bit of code required to get things initialized and running on their own. Terminus fulfills that role for Guildhall. Two items are worth noting. First, it's not based on any existing shell, so it's missing a lot of the niceties of an application like Mac's Terminal. Second, its historical record is substantially more robust than most shells, in that it can capture graphics and styled/colored text as well as plain text. The example from the game applet Delvenor Beacon illustrates this capability pretty well. Both Terminus and Delvenor use the same console code. You can also see another example at the discussion of the embedded C++ scripting language called Codex.

Terminus can perform quite a few commands in common with most shell programs, including listing files, moving and copying files, deleting and renaming files, creating and removing directories, and a lot more. It also has a lot of custom commands that generally prove necessary to keep Guildhall's environment neat and tidy.

Next Steps

• Whatever's needed