Lots of people have developed their own shell scripts or hacks to make their frequently used ROS commands easier to use. I developed mine into a full Python library.
ros_command is my answer to the following questions:
- Why can’t I type
roscd|rosmsg|rossrv|rosrun|rosclean
in ROS 2? - Why are the command line arguments for
catkin_make
,catkin build
andcolcon
so different and hard to remember? - Is this even close to done compiling?
- Why does installing all of the packages needed to compile this workspace take such a convoluted command?
- How do I run this node with gdb?
- What’s the command to
source
thesetup.bash
for the workspace I’m currently in? - I’m running ROS 2. I know I’m running ROS 2. Why am I still typing ROS 1 commands?
The full list of features is available in the README, but in short, the library
- provides a unified command line experience across ROS 1 / ROS 2 and
catkin_make/catkin_tools/colcon
- adds some short easy-to-remember commands for common actions
- displays a fancy terminal-based GUI during compilation.
We’ll call this the beta release for now, as I’m looking for other not-me developers to try it and test things out. As such, it is currently only available via source installation. Please feel free to open an issue for problems or feature requests. Current future work:
- More GUIs
- Tab completion
- Implementations for the missing
ros*
commands (likerosparam
androslaunch
) - Unified interface for running tests locally.
Happy Hacking,
David Lu!!
MetroRobots.com