Copyright © 1994,95 Tobias Ferber, <ferber@rpk.mach.uni-karlsruhe.de>
.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the author.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE | Warranty? No Warranty! | |
1 Introduction | What (and why) is AMan ?
| |
2 Installing AMan | Installing AMan on your system
| |
3 Invoking AMan | Invoking AMan
| |
4 Hints & Tips | ||
AMan needs the following tools: | ||
---|---|---|
5 FDB – A FindDB/UpdateDB Clone | kMel’s FindDB clone | |
6 MUI – MagicUserInterface | stuntzi’s MagicUserInterface | |
Index | ||
Master Index | Where can I find information about … ? |
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@input gpl.texinfo
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AMan
is a documentation browser for the Amiga. The idea is very simple and the implementation
is simple as well: Similar to the Unix ‘man’ command it locates documentation files on your disk
and spawns an external viewer. AMan
uses the FDB
tool by Klaus Melchior to locate the
files and opens a minimal MUI
window to allow a selection. See section FDB – A FindDB/UpdateDB Clone, and MUI – MagicUserInterface, for details.
Of course these tools are not included in this archive.
Actually, AMan
is only a quick hack. I initially wrote this tool for my private use
only and I wrote it simply because I didn’t want to use MrMan
anymore.
Nevertheless, AMan
’s concept is quite close to that of MrMan
, however it makes
heavily use of the said tools which are installed on my system anyway. And why should I invent
the wheel over and over again? Even Stuntzi’s MagicFileRequester
(MFR
) makes use
of FDB
!
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AMan
makes heavily use of some tools which therefore must be installed on your system.
Of course these tools are not included in this archive.
AMan
with muimaster.library
version 10.0.
FindDB
clone ‘FDB’. See section FDB – A FindDB/UpdateDB Clone, for more information.
The archive ‘util/cli/FDB1_3.lha’ can be obtained (e.g. via ftp
) from the Aminet.
Please make sure that the ‘FDB’ executable is in your path!
Besides that, a pager like ‘Most’ or ‘MuchMore’ is recommend but not required.
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Installing AMan
is quite simple. You only have to copy the file ‘aman.000’
(or ‘aman.030’ if you have an MC-68030 Amiga) somewhere into your path (e.g. to ‘C:’)
and rename it to ‘aman’.
Copy aman.030 TO C:aman
You might as well want to install the ldb2db
tool. See section Hints & Tips, for a description.
Simply copy it somewhere into your path as well.
Since AMan
needs FDB
, you have to install FDB
if you don’t already have it.
You should now make a database via UDB
. Note that by default, AMan
will only find
files which are listed in ‘FindDB:aman.codes’.
For example you might want to try the following:
UDB DB=aman help:
This will create the database ‘FindDB:aman.codes’ which contains all files in ‘help:’.
If you are using AMan
regularly then you might want to create a file ‘FindDB:aman.config’
which contains all the pathnames that should be scanned if you type ‘UDB DB=aman’.
For example,
Echo >FindDB:aman.config "help: docs: autodocs: gnu:man/"
Before running AMan
for the first time, you should make sure that MUI
is installed on
your system. See section MUI – MagicUserInterface, for details.
AMan
is now ready for a first take-off. However, AMan
will assume you want to use
MultiView
to view all types of documents. If you prefer some other pagers then you
have to create a file ‘ENV:aman.config’. This file will be parsed by AMan
via
ReadArgs()
in order to find out which viewer to use for the selected filename.
The following example is included in this archive:
; Template: PATTERN/A,COMMAND/A "#?.(doc|readme|txt)" "Most *"%s*"" "#?.dvi" "ShowDVI *"%s*"" "#?.guide" "AmigaGuide *"%s*"" "#?" "MultiView *"%s*""
Empty lines and lines beginning with a semicolon ‘;’ are ignored.
If no pattern matches or if ‘ENV:mrman.config’ does not exist, then AMan
uses the following default:
PATTERN "#?" COMMAND "Run <NIL: >NIL: MultiView *"%s*""
As you can see it is also possible to run viewers asynchronously. For those among
you who like it even more complex: I use the following command for the pattern
"#?/man[1-9]/#?.[1-9]"
in my ‘aman.config’:
"NewWSH CONSOLE NIL: COMMAND *"groff -Tascii -man ***"%s***" | More*""
Example:
Okay, lets try out AMan
now. First we will create an FDB
database for AMan
from the ‘gnu:man’ directory:
UDB db=aman gnu:man/
Now let’s see whether AMan
knows something about ‘gcc’.
aman gcc
AMan
should now open a MUI
window with a listview containing some alphabetically
sorted entries like that:
gnu:man/man1/gcc.0 gnu:man/cat1/hunk2gcc.0 gnu:man/cat1/gcc.0 gnu:man/man1/gcc.1
Simply select one of those with your cursor keys and press <Return>.
Your viewer should spawn and show the selected document. Press <ESC> to quit AMan
.
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When invoked from within a shell, AMan
uses ReadArgs()
with the following template
in order to parse command-line arguments:
DB=DataBase/K,H=Hide/K,E=Exact/S,P=Pattern/A/M
The ‘DB=DataBase’ parameter can be used to force AMan
to use a different database
than ‘FindDB:aman.codes’. For example,
aman db=find .texi
will use the default database ‘FindDB:find.codes’ to locate Texinfo
files.
Especially when using other databases there might also appear non-doc files in AMan
’s
listview which you might want to ‘Hide’…
For example, to avoid the listing of icons you can invoke AMan
as follows:
aman hide #?.info .dvi
This will show all the ‘.dvi’ files listed in ‘FindDB:aman.codes’ but not their icons.
Note: The patterns given to AMan
are directly passed to FDB
.
Especially the ‘E=Exact/S’ switch is an FDB
switch which allows real AmigaDOS
patterns instead of only a sub-strings.
Please consult your FDB
documentation for details. (E.g. via ‘aman fdb’)
Note also: AMan
internally makes use of the FDB
switch ‘F=Files/S’.
Nevertheless, FDB
returns directories together with files every now and then.
It’s a good idea to invoke AMan
with the option ‘HIDE #?/’ as a workaround to avoid
the listing of directories in AMan
’s listview.
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Especially when starting AMan
from the Workbench the ‘Pattern’ string gadget is
needed. It is active automatically when run from the Workbench, however it can be easily toggled
by pressing the <TAB> key when inactive.
After pressing <Return> in the string gadget, AMan
will parse it’s contents via
ReadArgs()
using the same template as when invoked from the shell.
This guarantees full functionality without too much effort. ;-)
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AMan
always strives to allow intuitive usage. Nevertheless, some of the following
hints might help you to make full profit of what AMan
offers.
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Good applications, especially if they have their own drawer, want their doumentation located
inside this drawer as well. This makes sense since uninstalling such an application by simply
deleting it’s drawer will leave no trails. However, this way the documentation files are
spread all over your disk(s) in their application drawers which makes maintaining the FDB
configuration ‘aman.config’ quite hard. This is why I wrote ldb2db
, a quick hack
which converts a list of files into a FDB
compatible database.
Let me explain how to use ldb2db
:
I regularly perform an UDB
of my three main partitions: ‘System:’, ‘Work:’ and
‘Devel:’ via CyberCron
. My ‘CronTab’ entry looks like this:
15 1 * * * UDB System: Work: Devel: :PRI -5
Now of course all the documentation files have already been collected into this database!
The LDB
tool, which is part of the FDB
distribution, can be used to list the
files in a database to stdout
and here it comes to ldb2db
:
LDB find | pgrep -x -i #?.(doc|guide) | ldb2db >FindDB:aman.codes
This extracts all ‘.doc’ or ‘.guide’ files listed in ‘FindDB:find.codes’ to
‘FindDB:aman.codes’.
Of course you can also specify a larger pattern for pgrep
such as
pgrep -x -i #?.(guide|doc|man|txt|readme|dvi|ps|texi|texinfo)
Note: pgrep
is FreeWare and was written by Angela Schmidt, angela@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de
.
It is available with her pattern.library
distribution.
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The FDB
and UDB
tools base on FindDB
and UpdateDB
by Larry Phillips
and Martin Steppler. UDB
collects filenames from a couple of path names into a database
file and FDB
locates patterns in these databases. AMan
uses FDB
in order
to retrieve the documentation files.
FDB
is © Copyright 1993-94 kMel
, Klaus Melchior,
Schulstraße 17, D-52156 Monschau, Germany. Phone: +49 (0)2472 4710
ADSP: kmel@eifel.adsp.sub.org
DE: kmel@eifel.fido.de
FIDO: 2:242/7.2@fidonet
, 2:2452/107.2@fidonet
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AMan
uses
MUI - MagicUserInterface
© Copyright 1993/94 by Stefan Stuntz
MUI is a system to generate and maintain graphical user interfaces. With the aid of a preferences program, the user of an application has the ability to customize the outfit according to his personal taste.
MUI is distributed as shareware. To obtain a complete package containing lots of examples and more information about registration please look for a file called ‘muiXXusr.lha’ (‘XX’ means the latest version number) on your local bulletin boards or on public domain disks.
If you want to register directly, feel free to send DM 30.– or US$ 20.– to
Stefan Stuntz
Eduard-Spranger-Straße 7
80935 München
GERMANY
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