Echo Console

Echo Console emulates a terminal inside your love2d game. It includes various useful commands, like getvar and setvar, lua, love, etc.

Features

Sandboxed and protect-called lua code.

When using the lua command, or any other that runs lua code, the code is called with pcall and has a custom enviroment (that can be modified with the env command) so you errors in the code don't affect your game.

Easy implementation

Implementing Echo Console in your project is as easy as writing 6 lines of code into your main.lua (see Post installation)

Clean codespace

Echo Console doesn't create any unwanted global variables.

Installation

First, clone or add as a submodule:

git clone https://github.com/Nykenik24/Echo-Console.git path/to/echo
# or, if you have a repository
git submodule add https://github.com/Nykenik24/Echo-Console.git path/to/echo

Then, require it in your main.lua or the file where you load libraries.

CONSOLE = require("path.to.echo")

Post installation

After installing echo, you need to actually implement it.

To implement echo into your love project, put this into your main.lua:

function love.load()
	CONSOLE = require("echo") -- see installation
	CONSOLE:init() -- initialize
end

function love.update()
	CONSOLE:update() -- update the console
end

function love.draw()
	CONSOLE:draw() -- draw when open
end

function love.keypressed(k)
	CONSOLE:keypressed(k) -- pass keypresses
end

function love.textinput(t)
	CONSOLE:textinput(t) -- pass text input
end

And that's it! You don't need nothing more, echo will handle text input, keypresses, etc. and draw only when open.

Usage

After doing the steps in Post installation, run your game and press the grave accent key (`) to open the console

To change this keybind, use CONSOLE:config("open_keybind", "(new keybind)") or open the console and type conf set open_keybind (new keybind).

After opening the console, you will see three things:

• Two tips, one saying how to get all commands and one saying how to disable tips.
• The "command prompt", the way you execute commands.

Here you will want to type help, as the first tip says, to know what each command does. If you want to know about an specific command, type help (command).

Let's try some commands!

• Type echo Hello, World!.
• Type msg error Goodbye, World!.
• Type flexists path/to/echo/init.lua.
• Type lua print(2 + 2).
• Type calc 4 * 2 + 6 / 3.
• Type env get all and getvar all.
• Type lua error("this code is sandboxed and protect-called").

Now create some global variable called TEST_VAR inside your main.lua and add it to the enviroment, then link the global variable with the enviroment variable.

function love.load()
	CONSOLE = require("echo")
	CONSOLE:init()

	TEST_VAR = CONSOLE:setVarInEnv(5, "TEST_VAR")
end

function love.update()
	CONSOLE.utils.linkGlobalToEnvVariable("TEST_VAR", "TEST_VAR")

	CONSOLE:update()
end
-- Other code...

Open the terminal and type getvar TEST_VAR and env get TEST_VAR:

More

Demo

The demo consists of main.lua and conf.lua, to run it use love.

Demo commands

The demo has some unique commands included:

• spawn - Spawn a rectangle at x (first arg), y (second arg).
• despawn - Despawns rectangle with index i (first arg).
• randomspawn - Spawn a rectangle at random position.
• chspeed - Changes rectangle speed.
• togglepause - Pauses/unpauses the rectangles.

Credits:

• Demo font: https://github.com/eliheuer/caskaydia-cove