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---File Tech--- v1.00 shareware by H/M Software Chris McEvoy & Chuck Homic Disclaimer: H/M Software takes no responsibility for any damage, hardware, or software, caused by this program, as it was not the intention of the authors. Table of Contents: Section 1 - Requirements and starting the program Section 2 - File Tech's environment Section 3 - The file window Section 4 - The command line Section 5 - The tree Section 6 - The edit window Section 7 - Configuring Section 8 - Error messages Section 9 - Troubleshooting Section 10 - What is shareware? Section 11 - How to register Section 12 - Trademarks, and copyright ------------------------------------------------- Section 1 - Requirements and starting the program ------------------------------------------------- File Tech requires 384k, and DOS 3.xx or higher. The authors recommend a 286 or higher, a mouse, a color monitor, and a hard drive. To start File Tech go to its path and type "FT." We recommend placing File Tech's path in the PATH of your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. That's it. ----------------------------------- Section 2 - File Tech's environment ----------------------------------- After starting File Tech the screen will be blank except for a bar at the top. This is the top bar or info bar. There are several words on this bar. Pressing Alt and the highlighted letter will bring up a menu. Using the mouse to click with the left button on the words will also bring up a menu. There is always access to these menus anytime in File Tech except when in a special window (discussed later). Red words are unavailable menus. The Open menu allows you to open any of the four main windows: the file window, tree, edit window, and command line. The key combination to the right of the window name can open a window without going to the open menu. Red choices are inactive because the maximum number of that type of window is already open. Go to Section 7 - Configuring, to find out how to change this limit. The Task menu shows a list of what windows are currently open. Clicking on a window name or pressing the letter next to it makes that window active (discussed later). The Config menu shows the different configurable areas of File Tech. See Section 7 - Configuring for information. The last menu is on the far right: Help. This brings up help on the active window. Use Page Up and Page Down to look through the help. Press A or click on the About button to show information about File Tech. Click outside the window or press Esc to exit help. To the right of the Config menu button is some information. The amount of conventional memory free in kilobytes, the date and time, and a number that stands for free windows left. This tells how many more windows can be opened. See Section 7 - Configuring for information on how to change the window limit. All four major windows have similar design. The buttons are yellow on brown in the default configuration. To use them click on them with the left button. Using the keyboard press the key shown in the button, or if there is no key, press the capital letter in the button. If a button has a highlighted letter, you have to press Ctrl and the highlighted letter. Many windows have scroll bars. Click using the left button on the arrows to use it. With the keyboard press Page Up and Down. All the major windows also have a title printed to the right of a funny looking character. This character signifies the window you're currently in, (only the active window has this character) and closes the window when clicked on. The Esc key also closes the active window. To move the window hold down the mouse button on the top line of the window and move the mouse. "Dragging" is holding the button and moving the mouse. Releasing the button is "dropping." Holding down Alt and pressing M puts the window in keyboard move mode. Use the arrow keys to move the window and then press Enter. The character in the upper left corner of the window will change to M in move mode. To size the window with the mouse drag the lower right corner of the window and drop it where the size is right. Holding Alt and pressing S will enter keyboard size mode. The character will change to an S and using the arrow keys sizes the window. Enter leaves this mode. The last thing is switching between windows. Clicking anywhere within a window makes it active if it already isn't. Alt and F10 switch through the windows. Special windows are any window that isn't one of the four major windows. In the default config special windows are white on light gray. They do not move or size and switching among them is not supported. Clicking outside a special window or pressing Escape cancels it. The config windows, and question boxes are special windows. --------------------------- Section 3 - The file window --------------------------- The file window is the most important and most complex of the windows. On the top of the window is a graph of the free space on the current drive. Below it is the current path. Below that there are columns for file name, extension, size, date, and attributes. This is the file list. Under this there is a display for space the current directory uses and along side is the free drive space. Finally there are two rows of buttons. There is a bar highlighting one file in the file list. The arrow keys move it up and down through the list. Pressing the left mouse button on a file goes to that file. Page Up and Page Down page through the list. The arrows on the scroll bar do the same thing. Pressing Home and End go to the top and bottom of the list. Pressing Insert on a file toggles between selected and deselected. The right mouse button does the same thing. Pressing "+" selects all the files specified (use wildcards). The key "-" does the opposite. Just pressing enter after pressing "+" or "-" selects or deselects all the files. Volume labels cannot be selected. An example of using selected files is selecting all the files to copy and then pressing the copy button and they will all be copied. The letters in the far right column stand far attributes. A for archive, R for read only, H for hidden, S for system, and V for volume label. Pressing these letters toggles that attribute of the current file. Clicking on the letters also changes the attributes. It is not possible to change the volume label attribute. Pressing enter or double clicking on a directory goes to that directory or if the directory is "..", the file list goes down a directory. Double clicking or pressing enter on any other file runs the command in the extension file. The extension file is explained later. Pressing enter on a .ZIP or .ARJ archive file makes the archive act like a directory (if you have the archiver directories correctly configured). Files can be copied from an archive and files can be deleted from an archive. All other functions are invalid when in an archive file. See Section 7 - Configuring for information on how to setup this archive feature. The first button on the button bar changes the current drive. Just enter the letter of the drive you wish to go to. The second button copies the highlighted file, or if there are files selected, the selected files to the destination specified. Dragging the copy button with the right mouse button into another file window or tree copies to where it is dropped. Ren/Mov renames if the destination is on the current directory or moves it if the destination is on another directory. Use dragging to move just like copy. The next button brings creates an edit window to edit the highlighted file. Dragging the edit button with the right mouse button into an edit window also edits the highlighted file, but does not open a new edit window. The Md button makes a directory. The Del button deletes the highlighted file. The Tree button activates a tree window of the current drive, and the Print button prints. The sort button brings up a window to change the file sorting. On the left of the window is a list of ways to sort the files: name, extension, size, time, and directories first. On the right is the current sort order. To explain this here is an example. A directory contains files with two extensions .BAK and .DOC. Normally the files are unordered. To make it neater, sort by extension first which puts all the .BAK files on top in the file list and the .DOC files under. Then, sort by name and all the .BAK files are alphabetized and so are the .DOC files. Now the files are neatly ordered and easy to understand. On the bottom there is an OK and a Clear button. The OK button confirms the changes made and the Clear button clears the current sort order. The final button in the file window is Find. This finds the specified file searching on all the directories of the current drive, or if you specify another drive, it looks on that drive instead. You can use wildcards in searching for files. You can also find a file in the current directory by pressing 'F'. You can enter the full filename of the file you wish to find, or just as much of it as you know. Wildcards are accepted. The highlighter will then be positioned to the first file that matches your criteria. One other feature of the file window is the ability to drag the path, displayed at the top, into a command line (using the right mouse button). This changes the directory of the command line to that of the file window. ---------------------------- Section 4 - The command line ---------------------------- The command line is a simple window. It is just the regular DOS command line. Enter a command and press enter. Backspace deletes a letter. The three buttons on command line are: History Up, History Down, and Clear Line. History Up cycles upward through the commands previously typed and Down cycles downward. The command line has room for 15 commands in history. Use up and down on the keyboard to use these. Clear Line clears the line. Pressing Home on the keyboard does this as well. -------------------- Section 5 - The tree -------------------- The tree is also a simple window. Use the arrow keys and Page Up and Down to move through the tree or use the scroll bars. Dragging from the file window onto a directory on the tree, copies or moves to that directory. Dragging a directory off the tree, with the right button, into a file window changes the directory of the file window. The Drv button on the tree changes to another drive. --------------------------- Section 6 - The edit window --------------------------- The final major window is the edit window. The edit window is a simple word processor. You can launch it from the file window or by using the open menu. Launching the edit window from the file window will edit the file the highlighter is on. The edit window has a large area for the text and a button bar underneath. To the right of the button bar is a status display. Text can entered just like any other word processor. Pressing the insert key toggles between insert mode and over type mode, changing the cursor color. Use the page up and page down keys to page through the file. The key combination Ctrl-Home goes to the first page of the document and Ctrl-End goes to the last page. Warning: Ctrl-End is very slow. Home goes to the end of the current line and End goes to the end of the current line. If you want to enter an ASCII character that's not on the keyboard, Ctrl-A pops up an ASCII chart. Enter the number of the desired ASCII character and it will be entered as if it was a key. Holding Alt and entering an ASCII character number on the keypad does this too, but Ctrl-A works much better with codes less than 32 (8 is backspace, 13 is enter, etc...). Entering Ctrl-Y deletes the current line. The scroll bars on the right and bottom of the document show where the cursor is in the document. Only in no wrap mode is the bottom, horizontal scroll bar displayed (explained later). Clicking on the arrows with the mouse moves the cursor through the document. The first button on the button bar is New. It clears the edit window for a new document. If necessary, a dialog box will ask to save the current file before clearing the edit window. The next button, Load, loads a file. Just enter the path to load. Again, a dialog box will appear if the current file is not saved. The next button is Save. This will prompt for a file name to save before saving the file. Copy, the following button, copies selected text. To select text place the cursor where to start selecting and press Ctrl-B. Move the cursor on the last position to select and press Ctrl-E. Place the cursor on the position to copy the text and press the Copy button. To copy across edit windows select the text in one window and then go to the other and press Alt-F4 at the correct position. Use the Erase button to delete selected text. Before deleting make sure the cursor is in front of the text to delete. The next button is Find. It brings up a find box. To enter the text to find press S or click on the button. Then enter the text and press return. To replace enter the replace text as well. Next choose a method. From the top of the document, from the cursor forward or from the cursor backward can be chosen. Finally choose OK to just find the text or choose either replace all or prompt on replace. Prompt on replace asks whether to replace or not for each find. Replace all does not prompt. The following button, Next, finds the next occurrence with the current search parameters. Warning: Find is very slow. The Mode button toggles between the three end of line modes. Most documents (especially on DOS systems) use CRLF, or carriage return, line feed, at the end of lines. Some documents, use LF, a linefeed, at the end of lines. The only instance of CR mode being used, to our knowledge, is when viewing Microsoft Word of Windows documents. The Wrap button toggles the text wrap through three different wrap modes. No wrap mode does not wrap the text and scrolling horizontally to see the rest of the line may be necessary. Wrap mode wraps the text at the edge of the edit window. Word wrap mode wraps words like a word processor. The status display shows four different pieces of information. The upper left of the display shows the current mode. The lower left shows the current wrap. The upper right displays the current character's ASCII code in decimal, in hexadecimal, and it's function (if there is one). The lower right of the status is the current file. When scrolling through the document a dialog box may pop up asking whether or not to save before going on, see Section 9 - Troubleshooting for details on this. If the document that is being paged though is large, the edit window creates a temporary file. Its name will be similar to this, "FT_TMPAA.AAA". Do NOT delete these files. The edit window will delete them when edit is exited. If the temporary files exist after closing all edit windows, these files can be deleted. Note: The edit window DOES NOT do ANY reformatting of the file on disk; only in memory. Therefore, it is safe to use on binary files, such as .EXE files. (If there were any reason to do so.) Only the changes you make specifically will be saved into the file. ----------------------- Section 7 - Configuring ----------------------- Users just getting started do not need to configure File Tech just yet and can skip this section. To configure an area of File Tech select it from the Config menu. Most config windows in File Tech are set up the same way. On the left there are colors. To change them click on the letter before the color with the left button to go through the foreground colors. Use the right button to change the background color. With the keyboard, press the letter of the color to change the foreground or hold down Shift and the letter for the background. On the right there are options. Some options are toggle options. A toggle option printed in white is active or true and red is inactive or false. Press the letter or click the letter to toggle the option. Other options have numbers printed after them. They will pop up a box to enter a number. Along the bottom there are four buttons. OK, Load, Save, and Help. Clicking on OK with the left button or pressing enter accepts the changes. Save, saves the changes, made in ANY config window, to the "FILETECH.CFG" file. Load, reloads the config file, undoing changes made after the last Save. Help brings up help on the current config box. The file window config has various configurable colors the on the left. On the right there are several options dealing with confirmation. Confirm delete asks before deleting a file. Confirm overwrite asks before copying or moving to an existing file. Confirm recursive delete asks before deleting files off a directory to be deleted. Confirm special file delete asks before deleting read only, hidden, or system files. The set sort method button sets the default sort method. The box that pops up is identical to the sort box in file window. The "set number of displayed files" button is just what it says. It prompts for the number of displayed files. The extensions button pops up a window to build or modify the "FILETECH.EXT" file. The extension information tells the file window what to do when enter is pressed or the mouse is double-clicked on a file. The extension button prompts for an extension. If that extension already exists its information is displayed, otherwise a new extension entry is created. The directory button lets you enter what directory should be the current directory when a file is executed. If you enter nothing, the current directory is used. The command button is the command to be executed. A "%" in the command represents the full filename of the file that was enter was pressed on. (For example, a command for .DOC files could be: "TYPE %" which would use the DOS command TYPE to view any .DOC file. Of course, why would you do this when you can use our editor to view documents?) The wait for key button tells File Tech if it should wait after executing the command. Use this if you need to see the output of a command before File Tech redraws the screen. The swap memory option makes File Tech free up the conventional memory before executing the command. It does this either by moving conventional memory to XMS or EMS, or by copying memory to a temporary file. (This may not work on all systems.) The three buttons on the bottom row are next, previous, and delete. Next goes to the next entry. Previous goes to the previous entry, and delete deletes the current entry. The tree config is simple compared to the file window config. Configurable colors are displayed and the one option sets the number of displayed directories. The editor config has five configurable colors on the left and six options on the right. The first option toggles the default wrap mode. The second toggles the default CRLF mode. The third and fourth options prompt to set the horizontal and vertical size of the text display window in edit. The next option changes the zone size. Read the section on troubleshooting for an in-depth discussion of the zone. The final option is the tab length. The command line config can set three colors. The options to set are: path prompt, which toggles the display of the path in the command line, wait for key, which toggles waiting after execution of a command on the command line, and swap memory which is the same option as swap memory in the file window config (above). The special window config can set up the colors of a special window. In the preferences config, two colors can be set, the error message color and the background character color. The option below these sets the background character. The ASCII table used is identical to the one in the edit window. Five options are beep on error, date method, time method, screen mode, and video setup. The screen mode toggles between 25 line, 43 line, 50 line, and other mode. The computer must have EGA or higher graphics to support 43 line mode, and VGA or higher to use 50 lines. If other mode is chosen video setup must be used. Video setup allows File Tech to use non-standard video modes. Using this, you can (for example) use 132x60 character mode (depending upon your video card) to display much more information than any other mode. It prompts for bios mode (in hexadecimal), rows (horizontal size), columns (vertical size), horizontal box size, and vertical box size. This information can usually be found in the graphics card user's manual. File Tech may not work with all modes. The infobar config can change the colors of various pieces of the infobar. To use the archive file handling features in the file window the archive config needs to be used. Three paths have to be set, the location of the Zip utility, the location of the Unzip utility, and the location of the .ARJ utility. The utility file names must be included in these paths. An example of a path would be: C:\ZIP\PKZIP.EXE. The final config window is the screen saver config. Use the first button to set which type of screen saver to use, either blank, random stuff, message, bouncing ball, stars, or an external screen saver. The next choice prompts for how long the File Tech must be inactive before starting the screen saver. The following button toggles the use of the password. The choice pops up a box for entering a new password. The next button prompts for a new message for the message screen saver. The final choice prompts for the path of the external screen saver. -------------------------- Section 8 - Error messages -------------------------- There two classes of errors in File Tech, critical errors and normal errors. Critical errors are generally more serious than normal ones. Most critical errors occur because there is a problem with a disk. An example is when the disk is taken out of the drive while being accessed. When you get a critical error, you can retry the operation. For example, put the disk back into the drive, and press 'Yes' to retry copying. If you don't want to retry, just hit 'No' and the operation will be cancelled. Critical device errors (such as printer errors) are not handled by File Tech and these cause a program abort. There are many types of normal errors. A "Cannot open a file" or "Cannot read from file" error usually occurs when a needed file has been deleted or moved. Most normal errors are easily remedied. When you get an error, you can look at "help" for information about that error. It lists some possible causes and remedies. ---------------------------- Section 9 - Troubleshooting ---------------------------- User: I am always low on memory when I run File Tech. Awesome authors: To free up some memory try removing some TSR's. If you have DOS 5 or higher you can load the TSR's into high memory. Also try decreasing the maximum number of windows and the edit zone size. And try changing the screen mode to something with fewer lines. Look at Section 7 for more on how to change these settings. User: I can't use the mouse in File Tech. Awesome authors: Make sure your mouse driver is installed. Read your mouse manual for info. Another possibility could be your mouse isn't Microsoft compatible. User: When I edit files I often get "You must save your work before going on." Awesome authors: To edit large files, File Tech copies part of the file into a memory buffer (referred to as the edit zone) and leaves the rest on disk. When you page down or up out of the edit zone you have to save the file to the disk before File Tech can load a new zone. To avoid this as much as possible increase the buffer size in the edit config to the max of 63k. (Of course that uses a lot of memory.) Or you can just save your changes when you plan to move to another location in the file. User: I can't print on my computer. Awesome authors: Our printer support is kinda wimpy and it only prints to the standard DOS printer so it may not work on all printers. Maybe in a future version we'll upgrade it. If it doesn't work on your computer, don't press it. User: Sometimes when I use the command line or execute programs from the file window my computer "hangs" or "jams up". Awesome authors: Sometimes computers do not entirely work with the swap memory option. Try turning it off. See Section 7 for details. User: I think I found an error in File Tech. What should I do? Awesome authors: An error? In OUR program? No way. Well if you did find an error send us an email at CMcEvoy@Delphi.com or write to us at: H/M Software 2925 Birchton Rd. Ballston Spa, NY 12020-2035 When reporting errors please be as detailed as possible. Use the exact wording of any error message, and say exactly what was happening when the error occured. Information about the computer it was running on would also be helpful. ------------------------------- Section 10 - What is shareware? ------------------------------- File Tech is shareware. This means give File Tech to your friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else. It also means that after using it for about 30 days, consider registering. Registering gives you the legal right to use the program and the authors some money for their work. It is important to register this program and all shareware programs you use regularly to support the shareware concept. That way the authors will earn money and want to make more and better programs. Also, when you register File Tech, you will recieve the latest version available. Remember: A rich author is a happy author. ;) ---------------------------- Section 11 - How to register ---------------------------- Registration for File Tech is $15. Credit card registrations are now accepted. View "ORDER.DOC" to order the registered versions of File Tech and other software by H/M. Thanks for your order. -Chris and Chuck, authors -------------------------------------- Section 12 - Trademarks, and copyright -------------------------------------- All trademarks are property of their respective companies. File Tech v1.00 is (C) Copyright 1994, H/M Software