On Disk Monthly 67/odm67.zip/POPINFO.TXT

Text File | 1992-03-20 | 8KB | 175 lines

Has this ever happened to you?  You just had a brilliant
idea and want to write it down, but can't find a pen or
paper... anyway, a paper note is likely to get lost in the
jumble of paperwork on your desk... you'd really like your
PC to keep track of these little notes to yourself.  You
would fire up that trusty old word processor, but you're in
the middle of running something else on your PC.  By the
time you've managed to get things together to write your
note, you've lost the train of thought and can't even
remember what you wanted to write down in the first place.

Pop-Up Notepad solves this problem.  It's a memory-resident
program available at the touch of a key to write short
messages, and to save and retrieve them using descriptive
names longer than the cryptic filenames usually used by MS-
DOS.

Right now, you are not actually running Pop-Up Notepad; you
are in an installation procedure that will let you install
Pop-Up Notepad onto your hard disk, and place it into your
AUTOEXEC.BAT file.  When you press ESC to leave this text
file, you will be given a chance to start this installation.

Thereafter, whenever you boot your system, Pop-Up Notepad
will be installed into memory.  If you choose not to
automatically install it, you may run Pop-Up Notepad
manually from the ODM disk (or another drive onto which you
have copied it) by typing POPNOTE.

Pop-Up Notepad takes up roughly 45 kilobytes of your memory.
Once it is loaded, you may run any other program on your PC
(with the possible exception of programs that require so
much memory that they won't fit once you have loaded Pop-Up
Notepad, and programs which run in graphics mode rather than
text mode).  To bring up the notepad, type ALT-N at any
time, whether you are at the DOS prompt or in the middle of
another program.  (To do this, hold down the ALT key, press
the letter N, then release both keys.)  A text editor will
pop up as a small window on your screen.  Type your note,
using your keyboard as if it were a typewriter.  Words will
wrap automatically at the end of each line, so there is no
need to press ENTER except to break paragraphs.  You may use
the arrow keys, PgUp, PgDn, Home and End to move around in
the text of your note and make changes.

The Ins key will toggle you between "insert" and "overwrite"
mode; the cursor will be a different shape for each.
"Insert" mode puts all characters you type into the text of
the note at the point of the cursor, moving all existing
text beyond that point to the right as needed.  "Overwrite"
mode puts what you type in place of whatever text was
already there.

The Del key deletes the character at the point of the
cursor.  The backspace key deletes the character to the left
of the cursor.  F7 deletes the entire line the cursor is on.
F6 inserts a blank line at the point of the cursor.  F9
clears the entire note.  Use these delete keys carefully, so
you don't wipe out something you really wanted to keep!

When you're done typing the note, there are several things
you can do with it:

F1 gives a help screen showing you all your options.

F3 saves the note to disk; if you don't do this, it will be
lost when you power down, reboot or remove the Pop-Up
Notepad from memory.  When you save, you will be asked for a
line of text to describe the note.  Pop-Up Notepad allows
more detailed descriptions than the usual eight-character
MS-DOS filenames most word processors are restricted to.

F4 retrieves a note you have saved.  When you press F4, you
are shown the descriptions of the notes you have saved.  Use
the arrow keys to move to the note you want to load, then
press ENTER.  If there is more than one page worth of notes,
there will be a "More" item at the bottom of the page; move
to it and press ENTER (or just press PgDn) to go on to the
next page of notes.

While the "Load" (F4) screen is displayed, press F7 to
delete the note represented by the description presently
highlighted; do this carefully, since it will wipe the note
completely off your disk.  Use this feature to clean out old
notes you no longer need, but be careful not to delete
something you really wanted to save.

F5 prints out the note.

F10 removes Pop-Up Notepad from memory, freeing the space
for other programs.  (F10 will only work if Pop-Up Notepad
is the last thing you have run.  If you are in the middle of
another program, you'll have to exit it before you can
terminate Pop-Up Notepad.  If you have loaded other memory-
resident programs, you'll have to unload them in the reverse
order you installed them, or else re-boot your system.)

ESC exits the notepad, leaving it in memory to pop up again
when you want it.

While it is best to use the built-in installation procedure
to install Pop-Up Notepad onto your hard disk, if you choose
to do it yourself manually, you should copy POPNOTE.EXE into
a directory of its own, like C:\POPNOTE\.  Then, you should
run it by typing something like:

C:\POPNOTE\POPNOTE C:\POPNOTE\

No, you don't have double vision; the repetition is
necessary to not only tell DOS to run Pop-Up Notepad from
the indicated directory, but also to tell Pop-Up Notepad in
what directory to store and retrieve notes.  In general,
anything you place on the command line after the name of the
POPNOTE program is interpreted as a path specification of
the directory to which notes should be saved and retrieved.
If this is left out, the current directory (at the time you
installed POPNOTE into memory) is used.  This will probably
be the root directory, but that gets cluttered enough
already on most hard disks.  You're really better off
specifying another directory.

If you always want to be able to retrieve all notes you have
saved, you should be consistent in invoking Pop-Up Notepad
with the same directory given on its parameter line.
Usually, the same directory into which you have installed
the program itself will be fine for this purpose, but you
may choose any directory.

If you have several users who use the same PC, or wish to
have different categories of notes, you might want to invoke
Pop-Up Notepad at different times with different
directories.  For instance, if you have Pop-Up Notepad in a
directory C:\POPNOTE\, and wish to have two different users
save their notes in directories named C:\NOTES\HIS\ and
C:\NOTES\HERS\ respectively, then you can invoke Pop-Up
Notepad using one of the following commands:

   C:\POPNOTE\POPNOTE C:\NOTES\HIS\

or

   C:\POPNOTE\POPNOTE C:\NOTES\HERS\

depending on which set of notes you'd like to use.  You
could put these commands into batch files named HIS.BAT and
HERS.BAT respectively (these are simply text files, each
containing one of the above lines, which are runnable from
the DOS command line by typing their name).  Note that once
you have run one of these, you must de-install Pop-Up
Notepad with the F10 command before you may run the other
above command, since only one copy of Pop-Up Notepad may be
in memory at any one time.  In all cases, the directory you
give on installing Pop-Up Notepad will be used for all note
storage and retrieval until you de-install the program, or
power down or reboot your PC.

Finally, if you have a monochrome monitor and find the color
scheme of Pop-Up Notepad to be difficult to read, run it
with the command:

   POPNOTE /M

to bring it up in black-and-white mode.  You may combine the
/M switch with a directory name, like:

   POPNOTE /M C:\NOTES

if you need to specify a note-saving directory.

NOTE:  If you ran On Disk Monthly by typing "GO /M" to put
the menu system into monochrome mode, this will be passed on
to the installation program, so that Pop-Up Notepad will be
installed in monochrome mode.