Back to main page
There are always things you can do with Workbench that you didn't know - it's quite a versatile beast. We've tried to include some of the more obvious ones here, but if there any you think we should be including, do let us know.
How do people snapshot their RAM disk icon? This isn't so difficult, but it does require a bit of lateral thinking, and the ability to edit a text file. You need to edit your s:user-startup file and enter the following:

copy S:ramdisk.icon ram:disk.info

Now, snapshot your RAM disk icon, by moving it to the place you want it to be, with the icon you want it to have, and select it then select "snapshot" from the Icon menu. You have to do a bit of CLI work here again, so open a shell window and type the following:

copy ram:disk.info s:ramdisk.icon

That's it! You only have to do that once, or at least once for each time you want to change your RAM disk's icon, and thereafter your RAM disk's icon will look how you want, and be in the place you've specified.

My CD icon always pushes other icons out of the way. The solution to this lies in how you are mounting your CD drive. If you put your CD0 mountlist into Devs:DOSDrivers it'll get mounted before any of the other icons appear on Workbench and will thus probably appear in the top-left corner. You can actually get around this by making sure you have no icons there to be displaced, by snapshotting all your other icons in other places on the screen, but the better way is to mount CD0 later in your Amiga's boot sequence. This can be done by editing your s:user-startup as follows:

mount cd0:

should go near the end of your user-startup. Then all you need do is move the icon for CD0 from Devs:DOSdrivers to sys:Storage/DOSDrivers instead.

I've seen people run programs from their Workbench menus. How do I do that? There are several choices, but perhaps the most popular is ToolsDaemon. It gives you as many extra menus as you can fit on your Workbench screen. It's very easy to add new programs to it - simplay drag the icon for the program you want over the ToolsDaemon prefs window and let go. The new program will be added to the list. There are plenty of other methods too. Some people like ToolManager which only allows you to use the existing Tools menu, but also gives you the chance to have "docks" - blocks of icons. The ultimate solution is to buy Directory Opus Magellan II. This gives you menus, docks, start menus and loads more ways to run programs.
Fonts are responsible for filling up my Workbench partition, but I can't do without them. What do I do? Not so hard. Copy your fonts directory in its entirety to another partition, then get ready to edit. Edit your s:startup-sequence, and look for the line that says:

Assign FONTS: sys:fonts

Change it to:

Assign FONTS: Work:fonts

or wherever you put the fonts directory.

I want to change the way my partitions are set up, but HDToolbox says that I'll lose information. It's true, you will unless you clear any partitions you wish to change. Let's say you have two partitions that you wish to make into three on a drive that has four partitions - Workbench, Work, Other and Data, and you wish to turn Other and Data into Other, Sound and Data. You'll have to make sure that both Other and Data are empty before you change their sizes to allow you to create Sound. If you don't do that, you will lose the data you had on the Other and Data partitions.
If you have any further tips for improving Workbench, please let us know so we can add them to this list.