Introducing the hub
To run our first example script, we told the TUI hub run "examples/wiki/first.pf". That is we ran the script by telling the hub to run the script for us.
The hub is a Pipefish service which is always running inside the TUI and manages other Pipefish services: it can start them, stop them, and supplies you with a lot of useful tooling: too much, in fact, to cover in this introductory article. To get you started here are some of the more essential commands.
As we've seen, this will initialize a service from the given script, and will give it a suitable name. If you want to name the service yourself, use hub run "<filename>" as "<service name>".
You can have more than one service running at a time. If, having run our first service, we now wish to run a second, we could for example do this:
This brings us on to the next useful hub command.
This lists all the services the hub is currently running.
This changes the current service, i.e. the one you're talking to through the TUI. As you'll have noticed, the name of the current service shows up in the prompt.
This halts the named service.
This gives the API of the current service.
This shuts down the hub and the TUI, but remembers every service you had running at shutdown, and starts them up again when you restart the TUI.