Requirements:

Ramdisk enabled. *

Intro:

"Zoom Shell is a command line tool with several features and commands built in which make it easy to take control of your computer. The basic idea of Zoom Shell is that you can type in commands to run them. However, Zoom Shell takes that idea much further, allowing you to create aliases for commands; "run" files or web sites just by typing in their names; and auto-completing file names as you type. As a command launcher, Zoom Shell is robust. It allows you to track and kill processes, and it logs your activities so that you can tell what you did when. It has command history and optional encryption of aliases." -(c) 1998 by David Fritts [*The home page URL no longer works!]

This utility is like a cross between command line and a GUI explorer. For instance, you can type the command "dir" (DOS) and it will send the results of your current directory to the output window where you can copy, save, and do other actions on the results. You can also double-click on folders in the command window to "cd" to them, or type cd in the command line. Typing "e:" at the command line will send you to that drive. You can also synchronize folders and use special scripts with it. Zoom Shell offers many more functions such as calculator commands.

Some Usage Notes:

A number of Unix commands were already ported into this application, such as diff, du, find, grep, head, kill, paste, ps, strings, tail, touch, which. "Type" and "ls" work natively as well (you can use "type" to output the contents of any text file into the output window). Some DOS commands will work, too (e.g. "dir"). Not all commands will send output to the output window; e.g., if you have the Unix Utilities plugin, using "cat" to concatenate files will briefly open an actual CMD console window instead of outputting the results directly to the output window. This could be customized a bit. Several other application-specific commands are listed from the main application help page.

DEBUG::
Under normal conditions, right-clicking on a file in the main window offers a few options. "Edit" should behave like a universal "Open with Notepad" and should open any file into Notepad. "Open" depends on Windows file associations and should start the appropriate application to open a file. Typing in path application names into the command line should also open them like in the Run dialog box (e.g. notepad). However, in all these cases, the external application process will start but an actual window will not appear when you run Zoom Shell from BartPE. If you type "notepad" into the command line, that is, a "notepad.exe" process will appear in the Task Manager but you can't see its window. I haven't pinned this down yet.

Also, the math function always fails even if you have the required Visual Basic 5 plugin, so I didn't add that to the requirements. ******** Further development of this plugin is suspended unless someone can help get some of the functions above working in BartPE. :P Ciao.

The HTML help files were not converted to RTF in this plugin version due to number of files and because the internal help search requires them; you should add your browser to the XML menu file to point to the HTML help. A couple sample entries are included but commented out. Or, just use your browser plugin to traverse to the help files in the ramdrive.

Other notes:

This application is no longer being developed and the original home page and author have disappeared. Because this was originally programmed for Windows 95 and NT (!), there will probably be a few XP/2k3-related bugs. You can still find the original application for download at Winsite.com if you want to try it out first. Zoom Shell is set to "always on top" and is available from right-click on directories/folders, and the output window is set to plaintext output instead of web (which creates performance overhead).

Information for target drive (%temp%) and no overwrite are embedded within the self-extracting executable itself. The super-sed provided in this plugin will likely overwrite the Unix Utilities version, but that's no problem. The Zoom Shell batch file will work as long as there is some version of sed in the system directory. The plugin will take up about 1.85 MB of cd-space in its compressed self-extracting executable form and will use around 5 MB Ramdisk space.