Page commands (`@cmd`)

[Paul Frazee]

Webterm is designed to run in "companion mode" with a browsing context. (That is, as a sidebar in an active browser window.) When in companion mode, webterm has an "active page."

"Page commands" would provide a way for the active page to export commands which are callable by webterm. This would be via some API such as:

navigator.registerCommand({
  name: 'hello',
  help: 'Say hello on the page',
  usage: 'hello [-u/--uppercase]',
  options: [
    {
      name: 'uppercase',
      abbr: 'u',
      help: 'Output hello in all caps',
      boolean: true,
      default: false
    }
  ],
  async command (opts) {
    var div = document.createElement('div')
    div.textContent = (opts.uppercase) ? 'HELLO' : 'hello'
    document.body.append(div)
  }
})

Page commands automatically have an @ prefix, which helps avoid collisions with the environment's installed commands. The above command would be invoked like this:

@hello -u

Page commands would be executed in the active page's context. The invocation and response would be serialized as a message and sent between the webterm context and the page context.