As promised, the launch script now accepts several switches and allow customizing Icaros options on the fly, as like as the Linux version does. So we now have these options available:
icaros -r
Resets/Restarts the current session of Icaros Desktop, while closing all other instances eventually left open. This can be very useful when, for some unknown and barely supported reason, AROS kernel hangs completely and the only option to close it would be calling Windows Task Manager. Just open another shell and enter this.
icaros -q
Quits/Kills any already running session of Icaros Desktop.
icaros -l
List of all Icaros system variables in Envarc: and exits.
icaros -c <variable> <value>
Changes the system environment variable <variable> with the setting <value> and launches Icaros Desktop. Change will be permanent, until the option isn't changed either inside Icaros Desktop with the proper application, or a different value is specified in another session. For instance: icaros -c Autoshell True will run Icaros Desktop and open a CLI command shell at startup.
icaros -d <variable>
Use at your own risk: this command DELETES a system environment variable, which may lead to unpredictable events immediately after.icaros -v <variable>
Shows the current value of a system environment variable, then it starts Icaros Desktop, unless a -x is specificed afterwards (see later).
icaros -h
Quickly shows currently supported options and quits.
-x
Add this to the end of the command line if you wish to NOT launch Icaros Desktop. For instance, a command like icaros -d autoshell -c opaque false -x will delete the autoshell variable, change the opaque one to false and then quit, without launching Icaros Desktop.
Hostbridge improvements
Windows' HostBridge is being worked on as well. Ther first important improvement is icaros_daemon.cmd being replaced by a compiled win32 executable. It does nothing more and nothing less the job of the current script, but at least it's now a Windows task that can be listed, managed and killed by Windows tools, like the Task Manager, tasklist and taskkill commands. Icaros' launch script now gracefully kills icaros daemon without asking the user to press Ctrl+C to manually stop it anymore.
Moreover, I made some steps into understanding how Windows .lnk files work, and I could already write a Windows script which is capable of extracting application name, path, arguments and icon, so I should have what's needed to port to Windows the Linux scripts which populate HostBridge drawer at startup (well, at least on Icaros 2.3 betas). If you can read Italian language, you can read more about this on my personal blog.