PurC Midnight Commander

A generic HVML renderer which runs in text-mode. This program is derived from the famous GNU Midnight Commander.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Source Tree of PurcMC
• Current Status
• Building
  • Commands
• Usage
  • Start HVML Renderer
  • Run Sample Client
• Authors and Contributors
• Copying

Introduction

PurC Midnight Commander (abbreviated as PurcMC) is an HVML renderer for development and debugging. It runs in a terminal or console like its ancestor: GNU Midnight Commander.

It keeps almost all functions of GNU MC with the following enhancements:

1. We use cmake as the building system instead of autoconf/automake.
2. We cleaned up the code and removed some features, such as support for various charsets (codepages). PurcMC assumes that the encoding is always UTF-8 by default.
3. It can load an HTML file on file systems and show the DOM tree. The user can travel the DOM tree and check the attributes and text content of elements.
4. It runs as an HVML renderer, accepts the connections from PurC-based HVML interpreter instances via Unix Domain Socket or Web Socket, and shows the uDOMs as trees in a screen. Driven by the remove HVML programs, it can update the uDOMs dynamically.

The following features are still under development:

1. The user can edit a uDOM tree, e.g., changing the attributes and contents of an element, or creating a new element.

For documents and other open source software around HVML, you can visit the following URLs:

• https://github.com/HVML, or
• https://hvml.fmsoft.cn

Source Tree of PurcMC

The source tree of PurcMC is illustrated as follow:

• source/cmake/: The cmake modules.
• source/wtf/: The simplified WTF (Web Template Framework) from WebKit.
• source/lib/: The common utilities library.
• source/bin/: The source files of the executable purcmc and others.
• source/tests/: The unit test programs.
• source/misc/: The miscellaneous and the default configuration files.
• source/po/: The translation files.
• docs/: Documents.
• tools/: Some tools for easy development.

Current Status

This project was launched in Nov. 2021.

We welcome anybody to take part in the development and contribute your effort!

For the community conduct, please refer to Code of Conduct.

Building

Building and install the latest PurC to your system first:

• PurC: the HVML interpreter for C language.

Commands

To build the source on Linux:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -DPORT=Linux
$ make

To build the source on macOS:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -DPORT=Mac
$ make

Usage

Start HVML Renderer

If you did not install PurCMC, please change to the build/ directory:

$ cd build/

Run purcmc with --help or --help-renderer option to show the command line options:

$ source/bin/purcmc --help

Run purcmc with -R option to start the PurCMC renderer server:

$ source/bin/purcmc -R

If you want to disable the support on WebSocket, you can run:

$ source/bin/purcmc -R --nowebsocket

Sencond, open another terminal to run an HVML interpreter or the sample client purcsmg in this repo.

Here are some tips:

1. In the default screen, you can choose a HTML file, press F3 or click View on the button bar to load the file and show the DOM tree in the DOM viewer.
2. If there is some clients connected to the renderer server and load a HTML content successfully, you can also choose DOM viewer in the Commands pull-down menu to show the DOM viewer.
3. In the DOM viewer, you can press F3 or click Switch on the button bar to switch to another opened HTML file or loaded uDOM.
4. In the DOM viewer, you can use Tab key to travel among widgets. In the DOM Tree widget, you can use arrow keys to travel the elements, fold or unfold a sub tree in DOM Tree widget.

Run Sample Client

First, change to the build/ directory:

$ cd build/

Run purcsmg with --help option to show the command line options:

$ source/bin/purcsmg --help

Use --file (-f) to load a HTML file, and use --testmethod (-m) to specify a test method (a value in 0 ~ 13):

$ source/bin/purcsmg -f clock.html -m 0

Switch to the terminal running purcmc. In the DOM viewer screen, you can show the uDOM and see the dynamically changes of the uDOM.

Authors and Contributors

• Vincent Wei
• Authors of GNU MC.

Copying

Copyright (C) 2022 Beijing FMSoft Technologies Co., Ltd.
Copyright (C) 2005-2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.