Almathera Ten Pack 3: CDPD 3/Almathera Ten on Ten - Disc 3: CDPD3.iso/scope/201-220/scopedisk211/climax/climax.readme

Text File | 1995-03-20 | 18.2 KB | 296 lines

                                     CLIMAX        (release four)

For those who have used CLImax in the version released on Fish disk 429 (release
three), here is a quick summary of how this version differs from that one:
    - It no longer requires ConMan.  You can specify an alternative console
       handler (such as NEWCON: or GMC:) on the command line or with a tooltype.
    - Command line options now need a dash before the letter(s).
    - There are new options for productivity mode, single bitplane, smart
       refresh under 2.0, and starting up with the window inactive and the
       screen behind other screens.
    - There are now separate Workbench tooltypes for each of these options.
    - You can specify a single command which CLImax will exit after running,
       thus enabling you to put any text-based program on its own custom screen
       in the background.  You can even run this command on a file argument
       passed by the Workbench.  It can optionally wait for the user to press
       return before exiting, after running this command.
    - It's pure now.  You can make it resident.

Have you ever wished your CLI window had 25 lines of 80 characters, just like
a good old fashioned non-windowing computer?  The answer is here: CLImax by
Paul Kienitz.  It creates a custom screen with a borderless backdrop CLI / Shell
window.  It can run one command in this window or create an interactive session.

To create an interactive Shell window, just type "CLImax" at a shell prompt, as
you would type "NewShell".  Or double click on the CLImax workbench icon.  There
are a number of options you can use to adjust the result:

If you wish to use an alternative console handler instead of CON:, you can put
the name of it on the command line (example: "CLImax NEWCON:"), or use the
Workbench's "Info" menu option to add a ToolType named HANDLER (example:
"HANDLER=GMC:").  CLImax works with the AmigaDOS 1.x and 2.x versions of CON:,
with NEWCON:, and with GMC:, and should work with any others that come up.  But
be warned -- do NOT try using it with RAW:!

The option -I (command line) or INTERLACE (tooltype -- it can be just the word
INTERLACE, you don't need INTERLACE=YES or anything like that), then it will
open an interlaced screen.  With this you can see 50 lines of text (using an 8
point font) instead of the usual 25, or if you are a PAL user, 64 instead of 32.
If you have set your system so that you have an overscanned workbench, then
CLImax's screen will be similarly oversized and you may get even more lines of
text.  With interlace, you might want to use a font taller than size 8 to make
the text more readable; with Topaz 11 you get at least 36 lines of text on a
non-overscanned NTSC display.

The option -E, or the tooltype TOPAZ11, causes CLImax to use the Topaz 11 font
in its window instead of the system default font.  Usually this would be used
with an interlaced screen.  Note:  this option does not work when using the GMC
handler, at least as of v9.6 of GMC.

The option -G, or the tooltype GREEN, causes it to use a color palette of black
text on a greenish background.  Normally it uses the same colors as the
workbench.  These colors are chosen to minimize visible flicker when using an
interlaced screen on a non-flicker-fixed monitor, particularly a 1080 or 1084.

The option -P, or the tooltype PRODUCTIVITY, causes it to use a productivity
mode screen.  This requires both the ECS Denise chip on your motherboard, and
AmigaDOS 2.0 or newer.  The screen will be 640 by 480 pixels, and Workbench
overscan is ignored, except for one weird little "feature" I put in:  since
switching from a NTSC screen to a productivity screen, at least on my system
(A3000 with C= 1930 monitor), causes the image to shift to the left on the
monitor, I made this option shift CLImax's screen as far to the right as the
Workbench's overscan allows.  If that's not appropriate for your system, just
use the mouse to drag it back to the left.  If you hate this feature, tell me.

The option -1, or the tooltype TWOCOLOR, causes it to open a one-bitplane screen
using only two colors, instead of the usual two-bitplane screen with four
colors.  This causes vertical scrolling to go twice as fast.

The option -B, or the tooltype INACTIVE, causes the screen to be opened behind
all other screens, with the window initially inactive.  Thus, you will not see
that CLImax has started up, until you move any screen(s) in front of it aside,
and see it there waiting for you.

The option -S, or the tooltype SMARTREFRESH, causes it to open a "smart refresh"
window under AmigaDOS 2.x, which makes the snip-text-with-the-mouse feature of
the 2.x console device unusable.  The window is always smart refresh under 1.3
and older.  I put this in because GMC (as of v9.6) is as yet unable to properly
handle a simple refresh window -- any other window that is opened on top of it
will erase all the text underneath.  And if you use ConMan with a simple refresh
window, then any program that switches the handler to raw mode, or from raw mode
to normal mode, will cause an annoying display glitch as the screen is quickly
erased and redrawn a couple of times.

The option -W, or the tooltype WAITRETURN, is ignored except when the DO option
has been used to make CLImax run just one command instead of creating an
interactive session.  When DO is used, this option causes CLImax to prompt the
user to press return before it exits and closes the screen.  Otherwise CLImax
closes down as soon as the program being run finishes.  The -W option or the
WAITRETURN tooltype may be followed by a number, for example -W10 (no space
between the W and the number) or WAITRETURN=5.  If this number is present, it
represents a "fail level".  If the return code of the command that is run is
greater than or equal to this number, then CLImax prompts you to press return
before it exits, otherwise it exits immediately.  This feature works only under
dos 2.0 and newer; under 1.3 the number is ignored.  The purpose of this is that
some commands you would want to run might not give you a chance to see their
output if there is an error and they exit right away, but you might not want to
have to press return if the command ran successfully.

CLImax will write out a summary of these options if you give the command "CLImax
?" or "CLImax H".  It will not open any screen in this case.

To end CLImax when the DO option is not used, just EndCLI as usual, or (under
dos 2.x) press control-backslash; the screen will be closed when there are no
windows left on it.  If there is still a window from some other program there
after the console closes, it will check once per second to see when it leaves,
and close when it's gone.  The console will stay open if some background process
started with a Run command still has a dublicate file handle on it, just like
regular NewCLI.

When CLImax starts up, it looks for the file S:Shell-Startup and if it exists,
executes it before giving the first prompt.  Typically this file contains a
bunch of Alias commands, among other things.  To specify a different file, use
the FROM option.  Either end the command line with "FROM filename", or use the
tooltype FROM=filename.  If you use FROM without any filename, then it will not
look for any file to execute.  "FROM" must be AFTER all other options on the
command line.  Example:  "CLImax -ie newcon: from ram:Shell-Startup" causes
CLImax to execute RAM:Shell-Startup instead of S:Shell-Startup before giving a
prompt, after opening a NEWCON: window using the Topaz 11 font on an interlaced
screen.

To make CLImax run just one command and then exit, use the DO option.  It is
used exactly like FROM, except that you put a complete command after it instead
of a filename.  You cannot use both FROM and DO on the command line, and if you
use both tooltypes, the FROM one is ignored.  The tooltype COMMAND can be used
as a synonym of DO, but only DO works in a CLI command.  On the command line,
you can put more than one command after DO just as you can with a Run command --
by ending the line with a plus sign and then putting the next command on a
separate line.  Here is an example of how that would look in a CLI session:

  1> climax do type my-text-file +
  echo "*N --- end of file" +
  wait 4

That example would open a CLImax screen, type a file onto it, add the line
" --- end of file" after a couple of blank lines at the bottom, wait four
seconds, and then close the screen.  Note that the combined length of all the
commands must be no more than about 245 characters.

Under 1.3 and older, it is possible that a failed DO command might cause the
CLImax running it to leave you with an interactive shell prompt.  This will
happen if it encounters a command it can't find, or if a command fails with an
error code higher than the process's "fail level", which defaults to 10.  You
can use the + feature to set the fail level with a FailAt command, like this:

  1> climax do failat 999 +
  cc arfarf.c

This will prevent CLImax from dumping you to a shell prompt if the cc command
fails with too high a return code.  Again, this does not happen under dos 2.0
and newer.

There is one possible hassle with running a DO command, depending on the console
handler you use ... you may be unable to interrupt it with control-C.  When the
DO option is used, control-C does not work if you use NEWCON or GMC or the
standard CON under dos 1.3 and older.  It does work with ConMan and with the 2.0
and newer standard CON.

The DO option can be used to "encapsulate" another program so that it uses a
CLImax screen.  One program that I like to treat this way is More, used for
viewing text files.  I still prefer it to other programs like MuchMore, because
it's simple and quick -- smooth scrolling is a waste of time, in my opinion.
But More by itself does not open its own screen ...  unless you use it with
CLImax.  One can use an alias to create a text viewing command called, for
instance, View:  "alias View climax -w5 do more []".  This not only puts More on
its own borderless screen, but lets the original CLI window where the View
command was given give a fresh prompt without waiting for More to exit.  The -w5
option makes it wait for you to press return if it exits with an error message
(such as when it can't find the file), but quit immediately if More displayed
the file successfully.

From Workbench, this "encapsulation" can be done with a special feature, which
uses a tooltype called ARGINSERT.  What you put after that tooltype is one
character, usually some punctuation mark.  For instance, "ARGINSERT=@".  When
this tooltype is used and a DO tooltype is also used, it searches the command
after DO= for the character after ARGINSERT, and at that point, substitutes into
the command the name of a file passed as a Workbench argument.  What this means
is that you can click on a CLImax icon that has these tooltypes, then shift-
double-click on a file, and the command in the DO tooltype will act on that
file.  For example, to use More in this way from the Workbench, one would create
an icon named (for example) View, which is attached to a copy of the CLImax
program, and give it these tooltypes:  "ARGINSERT=@" and "DO=More @".  (You
would also want to use WAITRETURN=5, if you have 2.0 or newer.)  When you use
shift-clicking to give it a Workbench argument, the @ is replaced with the name
of the file you used, so that the command that gets run is "More filename"
instead of "More @".  When this is done, the program is run with its current
directory set to the directory that the arg file (the one substituted for @) was
found in.  If you double-click it with no arg, the @ is removed.  If you give it
two or more extra args, it only uses the first one.  This works most efficiently
if More is made resident.

What I actually like to do is to name this copy of CLImax "SYS:Utilities/More"
so that icons which have that as their default tool will be displayed by it when
double clicked.  The actual More program is made resident as "Real-More", and
the More icon's tooltypes include "DO=Real-More @", and my shell aliases include
"alias V climax -isw5 do real-more []".  I also use this icon as an AppIcon by
means of Stefan Becker's ToolManager.  This allows me to simply drag the icon of
a text file onto a More icon on the Workbench backdrop, to view it with More run
under CLImax.  (I use another AppIcon to feed files to my text editor through
ARexx, using my FRX hack.)

When the current directory is not set by the ARGINSERT feature, the current
directory can be set from Workbench with a tooltype "CD".  When run from a CLI,
the current directory is always the same as it was where the command was given.
When you use the CD tooltype, the resulting CLI will show its current directory,
if you use %S in the prompt, to be an exact copy of the string you put after
"CD=".  For instance, if you use "CD=sys:trashcan", then the prompt would be
something like "1.sys:trashcan> " instead of the "1.Workbench1.3:Trashcan> " (or
whatever) that you would get if you gave an actual CD command.  So one should
give the full correct pathname after CD= if you care about such appearences, or
if you don't want to give a full pathname, the command CD "" (that is, CD to
nothing in quotes) can be used (in S:Shell-Startup perhaps) to convert the
prompt to the full correct pathname.

If you leave out the CD= tooltype, or name a nonexistent directory after CD=, a
CLImax started from Workbench will have no current directory.  The string in the
prompt will be "SYS:", but the effective CD will be the drive you booted from,
NOT the current definition of SYS:.  Note that many standard commands like Dir
and Copy don't like to have a null current directory, at least under 1.3.  They
attempt to read the boot drive for no reason, and can fail if there's no disk in
it, even if everything they're operating on is explicitly elsewhere.  Like, the
command "dir ram:"  will fail if there's no disk in the boot drive.  This is a
bug.  So if you ever create new CLI's that tell you "SYS:" when you ask what the
current directory is, for instance by using PopCLI or DMouse, you should make
use of my hack FixCLI, which will give a new CLI a path and a current directory,
if it has none already.  Just go "FixCLI dirname" in the Shell-Startup script.
Make FixCLI resident (it's real small) if you use it this way.

(Note:  It is possible to set CD= to a file instead of a directory.  Some
programs will bomb when run from such a CLI.)

There is one more tooltype option, for compatibility with older versions of
CLImax.  It is called OPTION, and the string after it consists of options that
you would put after a dash on the CLI command line, like I for interlace, 1 for
one bitplane, W5 for wait for return if the DO command's fail level is 5 or
more.  This can be more convenient than entering several tooltypes.

A CLImax started from the Workbench will attempt to copy the command path of the
Workbench process.  If there is none, it will look at other CLI processes and
copy what it finds.  One started from a CLI will copy the path of the CLI it was
started from.

In the upper right corner of the screen you'll see (parts of) the one or two
(depending on your AmigaDOS version) screen depth gadgets.  The screen is
slightly overscanned vertically even when your Workbench is not, and so (though
you can't see it) there is a piece of screen title bar above the top of the
window, which you can use to slide the screen vertically, or to click the depth
gadget(s).  With an interlaced screen the whole title bar is there in addition
to the 400 line window; with a non-interlaced screen the title bar and depth
gadgets are only partially uncovered (just four scan lines).  I know it sounds
unaesthetic, but it's not really so bad.  Because of the overscan, it helps to
use Preferences settings in which the workbench screen is moved slightly upwards
of center.  If the workbench is already overscanned, CLImax will not be any
larger than the workbench screen is.

Some of the programs you run will create windows and stuff on the Workbench
screen, and will seem to be doing nothing if you just look at the CLImax screen.
One program that is very useful with CLImax for switching screens is wKeys by
Davide Cervone, available on Fish disk 128.  Or you might prefer Matt Dillon's
DMouse or a similar mouse enhancer.  Personally, I use a modified DMouse with
wKeys-like screen flipping features, and a couple of other improvements.  If
anybody wants a copy of this DMouse (called DRat) I can give you one, but I'm
not mass-distributing it because Matt Dillon doesn't like it.

For CLImax to work under dos 1.3 and older, the Run program, and probably the
Execute program, must be available in C: or made resident.  Run must be on disk
if you are using a version of AmigaDOS earlier than 1.3.2 -- that's the first
version in which the Execute() function knows to look for Run in the resident
list.  If you are using 1.3 and don't have the 1.3.2 version of SetPatch, get
it.  It makes anything that uses Execute(), including CLImax, a lot faster and
more efficient, when Run is resident.  Make Run resident even if you don't make
anything else resident.  Under 2.0, Run is in the ROM so this is no problem, but
it still requires the Execute program to be available in most cases.  I suggest
making it resident in your startup-sequence.

It's possible that if you have CLImax and LoadWB both in your startup-
sequence (I do) that you might end up facing an inactive CLImax window which
ignores your typing because the workbench backdrop activated the moment the
initial CLI window vanished.  Try readjusting positions of these things in
startup-sequence; especially try putting CLImax at the very end.

CLImax is in the public domain.  Feedback is appreciated.  If you want to,
and this hack is useful to you, you can send me something nice in return.  Heck,
I'd just like to hear if anybody benefits from using it.  Earlier versions of
this program seemed to be a flop as far as public acclaim goes, but they only
worked with ConMan and didn't have a lot of the better features yet.

no email address, but try               Paul Kienitz
these northern California BBSes:        6430 San Pablo ave.
  Winners Circle 510-845-4812           Oakland, CA, 94608
  Triple-A       510-528-2867           USA
  The Mission    415-967-2021
  FAUG           415-595-2479
(the first two are in the east bay, the last two are in
silicon valley - you'll get slower response with those)