Folding Forum

Hi there.
Are there any alternatives to fah control running under windows? I don't like the GTK interface, because I can't use it with any screen readers, except with the OCR addon for NVDA, which is patchy at best. (that's nonvisual desktop access, by the way, not Nvidia)
Hope someone out there can help.
Thanks.

The API was published, I don't recall anyone programming an alternative GUI app to use instead of FAHControl on Windows. A couple monitoring apps to run on iOS or Android did get released, I think one of them could also start and stop the folding slots.

The other alternative is controlling FAHClient from the command line. From the command line you can use FAHClient to send commands to the FAHClient process running in the background. If you want to look at what commands are available type FAHClient --help in a CMD shell.

You can also telnet into the running FAHClient process and issue commands. That would be telnet 127.0.0.1 36330 on a command line. There is a help command available. Not all telnet apps work properly on Windows, it has been too long since I last looked up ones known to work.

Does HFM also have control functions, or just monitoring?

HFM can pause/resume/start/stop the slots. The only task that still requires FAHControl is the configuration of the clients.

Harlam says HFM can also send the finish command. It uses Windows Forms for.NET. It may support screen readers, but he doesn’t know.

So, your configuration choices are FAHControl, Web Control, command line, manual editing of config.xml while the client is not running, or a few third party utilities.

If you’re ok suffering with the v8 beta, it uses a web browser interface. I don’t know if everything is properly marked up for screen readers. You could try it and complain loudly if anything is broken with screen readers.

Yes, I'm trying the beta at the moment, and it's quite good, the web interface is a lot cleaner.
I am hoping that all configuration options will eventually be available to set through the web interface.
Are there any 3rd party utilities that can manipulate the config.xml file?

Not that I know of.
Most people risk editing with a text editor when the client is not running. If you get any syntax wrong the client is likely to crash at launch.

And you should know that v8 currently only reads config.xml. Anything exposed in web control is stored in the database. Such items are read from config.xml as first run default values.

I wrote a python script to configure v8 from the command line. There may be other tools.

Mine is announced here:
viewtopic.php?t=39241

Everything important is in web control. Or will be.