LookIt! 1.0 Demo PopIt! 1.0 Demo Programs written by Doug Harrison Copyright 1990 CodeHead Software & Doug Harrison All Rights Reserved. ------------------------------------------------ Packing List ------------ The following files are included in the official Demo release: a. LOOKDEMO.PRG b. POPDEMO.ACC c. REGACC.PRG d. DEMO.TXT If you receive a disk or archive lacking any of these files, then you have an unauthorized version. Please see "Distribution Policy" below for instructions regarding distribution of these files. Distribution Policy ------------------- You may freely distribute the LookIt! and PopIt! demos, as long as all files listed under "Packing List" are included. Any alteration of any of these files for any reason is forbidden. Getting Started =============== Before we discuss the PopIt! and LookIt! demos, you should place REGACC.PRG (RegAcc) in the AUTO folder of your boot disk (and POPDEMO.ACC in the root directory) and reset your computer. RegAcc is a tiny terminate and stay resident program which gathers information about desk accessories as they load, information impossible to obtain once the computer has booted and the GEM Desktop has appeared. PopIt! uses this information in providing its desk accessory hotkey services, and LookIt! uses this information to provide a menu bar operable solely from the keyboard. Even though REGACC.PRG is over 3,000 bytes long, once it becomes resident, it never requires more than 1,000 to 1,500 bytes of your memory. PopIt! Demo Version 1.0 ======================= Installing PopIt! ----------------- As described above, you first need to copy REGACC.PRG to your AUTO folder. Then place POPDEMO.ACC in the root directory of your boot drive and reset your computer. After the GEM Desktop has appeared, select PopIt! from the Desk menu; the PopIt! window will appear, and in it you will find a scrollable list containing the names of all the desk accessories currently loaded (including those inside MultiDesk- version 2.0 or later is required). Assigning Hotkeys ----------------- When you run PopIt! for the first time (and every time for the Demo version), no hotkeys will be assigned. To assign a hotkey to a desk accessory, click once on the desk accessory name in the PopIt! list, and then click on the "Assign button" (a short-cut is to Control-click on the name). Observe the "info line" in the window; it will state "Press a HotKey combination." The legal key combinations include: the alphabetic keys, numeric keys (including the keypad), the punctuation keys, the space key, the function keys, and any member of these sets combined with some combination of the Alternate, Control, Left-shift, and Right-shift keys (Alt, Ctrl, LS, and RS, respectively; LS and RS are distinct keys). Since these hotkeys will be active no matter what program you are running, you should strive to choose key combinations unlikely to be used by any program, because once RegAcc sees a keypress PopIt! is waiting for, that keypress is stolen, and a foreground program will not register it. Good choices include combinations like Ctrl-Alt-Key, LS-Ctrl-Key, etc. Once you have entered a hotkey, you may later want to change it. Select the accessory as described above, and press the new combination. Press Undo to clear the hotkey definition. Press Return, Enter, or Esc to cancel the assignment and keep the old definition. Note that several important features are inactive in the Demo version of PopIt! Among them are the abilities to save, load, and print configuration files, which can contain hotkey definitions for as many as 50 desk accessories. Naturally, the full version of PopIt! loads a default configuration file at boot-time, so that hotkeys are assigned automatically every time you turn on or reset your computer. LookIt! Demo Version 1.0 ======================== Overview ======== LookIt! is an incredibly fast, easy to use ASCII file viewer and binary file editor. It features a custom user interface which overcomes many shortcomings in GEM. Some of LookIt!'s feature include: - super-fast text display, Blitter/Turbo ST not required - as many as 32 files can be held simultaneously in memory - fast regular expression as well as exact match searching - saveable search strings (18 are available) - binary file editing on both the hexadecimal and ASCII representations of binary files - flexible display options, including color and font size control in high resolution modes - printer options allow 40 byte strings to be sent before/after each file and provide for draft/final and condensed print modes; margins may be set and headers printed - may be installed as an application for the GEM Desktop or CodeHead's HotWire, to let you show files by double-clicking them - flexible command line options allow loading of CFG files from paths other than the default, automatic printing of files, wildcard expansion - a menu bar operable solely from the keyboard (try Alt-F and then the arrow keys, Return, Esc, or Undo; don't forget the mouse works as usual!) - hotkeys for dialog box buttons and edit fields (use Alt-letter if edit fields are present; otherwise the letter alone suffices) - keyboard equivalent for Cancel buttons; Esc, Ctrl-Esc, Alt-Esc, and Undo all exit a menu/dialog/alert Part 1: Essential Concepts ========================== The File List ------------- The central LookIt! concept is the file list. The file list may contain up to 32 files at any given time (the demo version is limited to a maximum of two files, and the maximum file size for the demo version is 40K bytes). You can step forward and backward through the list, or you can choose a file directly from a scrollable list containing the filenames. The Display ----------- LookIt! has two display screens; the "GEM screen" provides a menu bar, while one views files from the "View screen." Assuming use of the standard monitors, the View screen provides a full 80 columns, and in monochrome, it supports the 50 line mode. LookIt! requires a graphics mode resolution of at least 640x200 pixels, which is the ST medium resolution mode. View Mode --------- Since LookIt! supports viewing of both ASCII and binary files, each file has an associated type, which controls the view mode. Opening a File -------------- To open a file, select File Open from the menu bar. You will be presented with a custom file selector, which is a bit different from the GEM item selector and other replacements. Some of the enhancements include directory navigation via constructs like "..\..\SRC" and much improved editable field text editing (note that to back out one directory level, you should click on the name of the directory in the "Path" line or type "..\" followed by Return). File selection works much like the GEM item selector, except that you may select multiple files, adding them to the file list. Since the file list only has room for 32 entries (two for the Demo version), any files above this limit are ignored; that is, if you select 100 files, LookIt! will only acknowledge the first n entries. However, if there isn't enough space in the file list for the files LookIt! does acknowledge, you will be asked to remove enough files from the list to make room for the new ones (this applies to the _number_ of files, not the memory they require; LookIt! handles memory management itself). LookIt! provides several standard file extensions, and it automatically opens files with these extensions in the proper view mode, Text or Binary. Files that do not match any of the extensions are opened in Text mode by default. You can override this as follows. To open any file in Text mode, press the right Shift key when you double-click on the file or press Return to close the file selector. To open a file in Binary mode, press the left Shift key. Be aware that if you use the Shift keys, all selected files will be assigned the indicated mode, even if they match the built-in extensions. LookIt! also provides "Open Binary File" and "Open Text File" menu items. When you choose one of these, LookIt! opens files in the indicated mode, unless they match one of the built-in file extensions, in which case they are opened in the default mode for the extension. You can still override the default by using the Shift keys as described above. The result of all this is that you can select several files, say, some .PRG, some .S, some .TXT, and some .ACC, and they will all be assigned the proper mode, unless you have chosen to override the default by pressing the shift keys. Part 2: Viewing Files ===================== File Viewing Quick Start ------------------------ Assuming you've already opened a file, you will be in the View screen. While you're viewing a file, many of the keys on the ST keyboard are used for special functions; for example the up/down arrow keys scroll one line at a time, Shift-up/down moves by pages, etc. Since this is just the demo version of LookIt!, we won't list all the key commands used by the program here. But just try typing some keys (you can't hurt anything) and see what happens. (Hey...think of it as fun...an adventure!) Memory Management ----------------- In order to provide the fastest possible display in Text mode, LookIt! requires the file to fit completely in the ST's memory. The memory required by a text file is the size of the file plus an additional four bytes per line. The only hard limit for text files, besides the above, is the number of lines; only(!) the first 65,536 lines of a text file will be displayed. Binary files require 16K bytes each; for files larger than 16K, LookIt! will load additional parts of the file as necessary, and for Binary mode, there is no practical limit to file size. (Note: the Demo version of LookIt! limits the maximum file size to 40K bytes) LookIt! keeps as many files as possible in memory, so that you can flip back and forth between files instantly, without reloading them, losing your place, etc. When you attempt to load a file that is too large to fit in the remaining space, LookIt! will free memory occupied by files currently in the File List, beginning with the smallest files, until there is enough room to load the new file. Although memory used by these files is freed, the files remain in the File List, so that they still may be viewed without resorting to the File Selector; they will, of course, have to be reloaded from disk. Changing the View Mode ---------------------- Once a file has been added to the list, you still have a chance to switch view modes. While viewing a file, press F7 to change to the complementary mode. While in the GEM screen, select View File List or press F. This leads you to the File List dialog box, described below. Changing the view mode "invalidates" the file, which means it must be reloaded from disk to be viewed in the new mode. Viewing Binary Files -------------------- LookIt! displays Binary files as a series of rows of 16 byte lines; the left side of the screen displays the bytes in hexadecimal, while the right side contains the ASCII representation of the bytes. The far left side of each line contains the offset into the file of the first byte in the line; this is the row offset value. This value will always be a multiple of 16. When viewed from top to bottom, the bytes form columns, and the top line of the screen displays the offsets into the line of each column; these are the column offset values. To determine the offset into the file of a given byte, add the column offset value for the byte, which always lies in the range 0 to 15, to the row offset value. Note: the number 0 is shown as a decimal point in the ASCII display area. Note: the first byte in the file is at offset 0, not 1. Editing Binary Files -------------------- To edit a binary file, press 'E'. The mouse pointer will appear, and the status line will indicate that you are now in Edit Mode. To begin editing, click on a byte in either the hexadecimal display or the ASCII display. A flashing cursor will appear, and you can begin typing in changes. Use the cursor keys to move around the displayed area; you will not be allowed to scroll the file while in Edit Mode. You may edit either the hex bytes or the ASCII representation, and you may switch back and forth by pressing the Tab key. Editing is simple to do; whatever you type replaces whatever was there before. The only complication is entering zero in the ASCII display. You may accomplish this by pressing the Insert key. To exit Edit Mode with the intent to update the disk file, press Return. Providing you've actually altered some bytes, an alert will appear asking you to confirm the changes. If you decide you don't want to alter the file, choose Cancel. If you press OK, LookIt! will attempt to update the file on disk to reflect the changes you have made. To exit Edit Mode, directly cancelling any changes and without updating the disk file, press Undo. Note: the demo version allows you to explore the editing features but is incapable of altering files. Searching --------- LookIt! has state-of-the-art, comprehensive text/binary search capabilities. LookIt! supports not only exact-match searching but Unix-style regular expressions (in the egrep spirit), as well. Space does not permit a discussion of regular expressions here; suffice it to say that they provide a simple pattern-matching language far more powerful than the standard `*' and `?' wildcard characters TOS and many programs limit you to. Up to 18 search strings can be defined, and saved in the LookIt! configuration file, so that they are available automatically each time you run the program. Search strings can be invoked with a single keypress while in viewing mode. (Note: you won't be able to save configuration files with the demo version). Part 3: End of File =================== This concludes the documentation for the Demo version of LookIt! Although many features haven't been described, you should have enough information to work with the program and decide whether or not it's for you. And if you do purchase LookIt!, you'll receive the real manual, which explains the LookIt! command line options, configuration files, regular expressions, printing, and much more. And don't forget; LookIt! is packaged with PopIt!, the desk accessory that seamlessly "HotWire's" all your desk accessories! ========================================================================= Ordering Information -------------------- LookIt! and PopIt! are sold together for a retail price of $39.95. To order the latest versions of LookIt! and PopIt! (or any CodeHead Software product) contact us at: CodeHead Software P.O. Box 74090 Los Angeles, CA 90004 Voice: (213) 386-5735 Fax: (213) 386-5789 Most major credit cards are accepted. When ordering by mail, please send a check or money order for the amount indicated plus $2.00 shipping (Canada $3, Europe $5). California residents please add 6.5% sales tax. CodeHead products can also be found at most Atari dealers and retailers.