Hi everyone ! Today, we are glad to give you our Christmas present (even though it’s still a little early for Christmas, but you get the idea), Picobat’s version 218.3.

This new version include new features and bug fixes that will be listed below. If you can’t stand waiting to test it, just check it out and download it at the download page.

Modules

In this version, much effort has been put into adding a module capability to Picobat. This enables custom commands to be added to Picobat by loading an external file at run time, keeping the interpreter itself small, and enabling more customisation. This also implies that you can code custom commands without having to mess with the whole code.

Modules must be loaded using the MOD command. After this command has performed successfully, custom commands can directly be used.

Custom commands included in modules can affect Picobat internal environment and its parameters. However, they can not modify the syntax itself and can not use blocks as IF or FOR do. If you are tempted by writing some modules, check out the GUIDELINES.md file in the source distribution.

Batbox Module

Support for the original batbox command has been dropped years ago. However, even though there are good alternatives out there, many batch programmer never quit using it. That’s why we decided the very first module for Picobat would be the BATBOX. This module can be loaded using:

MOD batbox

Once loaded, an enhanced version of the original batbox command can called. This command is extremely useful to display graphics at the console and getting all sorts of input (mouse or keyboard) from the user.

The big news is the possibility to use variables to retrieve mouse or keyboard input, for example:

batbox /k key
:: or
batbox /m x y type

VER command

Thanks to the contribution of Xenoxis, the VER command has been added to Picobat. This command enables getting specific version informations about the OS that could not be retrieved using %DOS9_OS%.

Fixes

  • A bunch of fixes to the autocompletion feature that is quit stable now.
  • Several bugfixes to the core of Picobat to solve parsing issue.
  • Modification of %PATH% search behaviour: now the interpreters only search in %PATH% sub-folders when the relative path do not include sub-folders.
  • Fixes to the SET /a command.

All the fixes are detailed in the WHATSNEW.md file of the source distribution.

That’s all folks …

Well, that’s pretty much every new feature, we still have lots of projects for Picobat, but that will be for another version, coming as soon as possible. Until then, have fun, a merry Christmas and a happy new year.