Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac 1993 September/September 93.iso/Archives/Applications/Text/Text Editors/mcsink7.0a/McSink V7.0 Changes

Text File | 1990-01-28 | 20.4 KB | 431 lines | [TEXT/McSk]

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McSink V7.0 Docs                        1/25/90

Here's a short summary of all of the additions, changes, removals, and
improvements in McSink V7.0...

                        Dave McWherter


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            ***--> Special note: <--***
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    This is the first version of McSink which has a few major features
removed because of a conflict between McSink and Vantage. As such, I'd like to
offer the following explanation for that...

    As most of you probably know, McSink is a "little brother" to a
commercial program called Vantage which is published and distributed by
Preferred Publishers. McSink's continued existence as a shareware program owes
a great deal to the foresight and consideration of Preferred Publishers. It's
pretty unique in the Mac software world to allow a shareware version of a
commercial program to coexist with its commercial counterpart. This new version
of McSink is a reflection of Preferred's continued support for its original
shareware customers.

    My agreement with Preferred allows me to continue to update McSink as a
shareware entity, as long as new versions of McSink don't take customers away
from Vantage. (A reasonable desire, don't you think?) In particular, any new
versions of McSink are not supposed to offer any functional enhancements - they
are to be bug-fixers only. This new version, however, goes against that policy
in some ways, as it adds a few new commands. However, it also takes away a
feature or two, because of Preferred's (and mine - I make more money on Vantage
too!) need to keep a strong distinction between McSink and Vantage.

    There are two major features which have been removed in this version,
the List Files command and the Wrap Typing mode. Each was removed for a
slightly different reason, but both center on the fact that McSink and Vantage
are both created from the same source code. I'd go crazier if I had to support
two completely different programs. So McSink and Vantage are identical except
for what features get compiled (actually, assembled) in when I make a new
version. What all of that means is that any major change to Vantage is also
reflected in McSink. With this version, I've come up against two features which
have been improved in Vantage in such a way that I can no longer support them
in McSink.

    List Files was removed because in Vantage an External VCMD called
Catalog does the same function much better. The Catalog VCMD provides for
folder nesting and a few other real nice features which List Files didn't do.

    The Wrap Typing mode was removed because Vantage no longer supports it.
Instead, Vantage provides real automatic word wrap, and the Wrap Typing
checkbox has been changed to Word Wrap to reflect that. However, the
implementation of word wrap was a very major change to Vantage, and I couldn't
continue to support the Wrap Typing mode because of conflicts between the two.
(Besides, in Word Wrap mode, a Wrap Typing mode would be more than a little
redundant.) All of this is fine you say, but why not just have McSink support
real word wrap mode? Because word wrap is an important enough feature that
Preferred (and I) feel that it should be one of the points of distinction
between McSink and Vantage. So McSink no longer wraps typing. If you want to
wrap typing, you're just going to have to upgrade to Vantage and live with real
word wrap.

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                Additions:
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• McSink can now use Vantage's External commands, which are special commands
which can be installed into the External menu. Vantage can support up to 32
External commands, and they can be permanently installed into Vantage so that
they're always available. McSink, however, only supports one External command,
and it must be loaded with the Load VCMD command in the External menu every
time you open McSink. This seems to be a reasonable compromise between keeping
a sharp distinction between Vantage and McSink, yet still allowing McSink
user's to get a feeling for what External commands are and what they can do.

• The following additional information is now saved with each document: the
wrap line length, the horizontal scroll bar state, the auto-indent state, the
show page breaks state, the show status line state, the window's colors (if
any), and the window's size and position. In addition, changing any of these
settings except the window's size and position will now mark the window as
dirty.

• Added: There is now a command key equivalent for the Settings menu item in
the Layout menu - Cmd-Y.

• New command called Copy Lines Containing... It allows you to Copy all lines
which contain a specified string to the clipboard.

• New command called Cut Lines Containing... Same as above, except that the
affected lines are also Cut.

• New command called Balance, which balances bracket groups and selects the
most outermost bracket block from the insertion point (or the start of a
selection.) The bracket pairs recognized are (), [], and {}.

• New command called Strip Leading Space which strips leading white space
characters from the beginnings of lines.

• New printing capabilities. See the detailed description below on New Printing
Stuff.

• In the Tile Windows command, if you hold down the Option key while selecting
the command from the menu, then windows are tiled in the opposite manner of the
tiling method currently selected in the Configure dialog.

• Cmd-Option-Arrow now does a page scroll in the arrow direction.

• The cursor now changes to a spinning beachball during long operations. The
cursor will start out as a watch and then change to a beachball after about a
second or so.

• You can now abort a Sort or Change All with the Cmd-. (command period) key.

• You can now add a space after added line numbers in the Add Line Numbers
command by checking that checkbox in the Numbering Parameters dialog. Also,
line numbers can now go up to six digits before wrapping.

• There's a new checkbox in the Configure dialog called "Enable keyboard
buffer." Turns out that some programs (Thunder II is one) have problems with
McSink's new keyboard buffering scheme. This option provides the ability to
eliminate the use of the buffer and go back to the old way of handling
keystrokes.

• Printed text now shows invisible chars if Show Invisibles is turned on.

• McSink now has a 'vers' resource for the Finder's Get Info command.

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                Removals:
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• The Wrap Typing mode in the Configure dialog is gone. The reason is that
McSink and Vantage (the commercial version) are both built from the same source
code. Vantage now does real automatic word wrap, so the Wrap Typing mode was
changed in Vantage to Word Wrap mode. Furthermore, as an incentive for
purchasing Vantage, the real Word Wrap mode won't be available in McSink - only
in Vantage. Unfortunately, I can't support both modes in the same code without
extreme difficulty, so I dropped the Wrap Typing mode from McSink.

• The List Files command has been removed because the External Catalog VCMD
does the same thing much better. (Unfortunately, External VCMDs are only
minimally supported in McSink - you'll have to get Vantage if you want to
frequently use the List/Catalog capability.)

• The Icon menu bar mode has been removed. Because it was ugly, it took up too
much space in the window, and I don't know of one person who used it.

• The box fill status rectangle in the Sort and Print commands no longer
appears.

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                Changes:
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• The saving of a window's default settings (the line length, the tab value,
the font info, the window size and position, etc.) has been changed.
Previously, anytime you changed a window's settings, the new settings were
remembered as the "default" settings for any future openings of the window.
This is no longer true. The default settings are now only remembered and
associated with a window if a document is not open in the window (the window is
untitled, with a "McSink n" name.) If a document is open in a window and you
make any changes to the settings, the new settings are saved with the document
- the window's default settings are not affected. Document settings will still
override a window's default settings.

• So that the Cmd-0 thru Cmd-9 sequences could be assigned to Vantage's new
marker jump commands, all of the old numeric command key equivalents have been
removed. Anyone who wants the old numeric sequences back can ResEdit McSink's
MENU resources to do so.

• In the Find dialog:
    - All items were rearranged.
    - Command key equivalents are now shown on the buttons.
    - There's a new status message field, which is initially completely
        blank. This field is used to show the three possible messages:
        "Found.", "Can't find string.", or "nnn change(s) made." When
        these messages are displayed, they'll be inside of a shadowed
        rectangle.
    - The "Can't find" and the "nnn change(s) made" messages are no longer
        displayed in dialog boxes.
    - Added a "Whole words" checkbox. Turn this on and only matches which
        are whole words will be found.

• The definition of a word has changed for double-clicked selections: a word
now will only contain the chars 'A…Z', 'a…a', '0…9', or '_@$%'. In addition,
you can customize your own word definitions by editing the WDBK resource in
McSink with ResEdit. There are 256 bytes in the WDBK word break table. If a
byte is non-zero, then the ASCII character represented by the position of that
byte in the table will be treated as a word break character.

• The maximum number of windows has been raised from 16 to 32.

• If McSink is opened with the McSink Opener (by double-clicking on a McSink
file), then the Open File on Open checkbox in the Configure dialog is ignored
and you don't get the Open File dialog box after your double-clicked files are
opened.

• The number of columns supported by the columnize commands has been increased
from 8 to 32.

• If you print a selection, the selection must now be in units of whole lines.

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                Improvements:
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• You can now correctly scroll through files with more than 32,767 lines.

• Drag selections are slightly smoother now.

• Tabstops in proportional fonts now line up.

• McSink now uses a keyboard buffer to buffer text if it falls behind on
processing keyboard typing. This significantly improves the feel of keyboard
response.

• Scrolling with the thumb is now much faster.

• Find is about five times faster.

• The Find dialog is now not loaded unless it's needed.

• All dialogs and other miscellaneous resources are now marked as purgeable.

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            New Printing Stuff:
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The Print Setup dialog has been significantly expanded. In addition to being
able to specify a top margin, a left margin, and a page length, you can now
also specify a bottom margin, a right margin, and multiple-line headers and
footers. *** However, the right margin and headers and footers only have
meaning in Vantage and are not functional in McSink. *** Also, you can now let
McSink calculate how many lines will fit on a page. Here are the details:

McSink now prints pages in the following format:


        Top margin (blank lines)

        Header (user-specifiable lines) (*** only in Vantage *** )

        Page body (window text)

        Footer (user-specifiable lines) (*** only in Vantage *** )

        Bottom margin (blank lines)


The number of lines in the top margin and the bottom margin, and the contents
of the header and footer are setup in the Print Setup dialog, along with the
page length (the total number of lines printed per page.)

A major change in V2.0 is that the page length now includes all of the lines
that McSink prints on each page. This includes the top and bottom margins and
the number of lines in the header and footer. For example, if you specify a
page length of 60, a top margin of 2, a bottom margin of 3, and a header and
footer each containing one line, then McSink will print 60 lines per page - 5
blank lines for the top and bottom margins, 1 line each for the header and
footer, and 53 lines of text body. This is exactly the opposite of how the old
McSink worked. In addition, when you Show Page Breaks, the page break lines
take into account the number of lines in the margins and the header and footer.
This lets you see exactly where your text lines are going to break.

Another change in V2.0 is that you can now specify a page length of zero. If
you do, then McSink will automatically calculate how many lines will fit on
each page. The number of lines that will fit on a page is dependent upon the
page rectangle for the current printer and the current font and its size. (Note
that this feature generally won't work correctly in draft mode, because McSink
has no way of knowing the pixel height of each line the printer is going to
print.)

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                Bug fixes:
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Numerous bugs have been fixed, which I am too embarrassed to go into here in
detail.

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                The sales pitch:
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    McSink is a shareware advertisement for Vantage, a commercial version
of McSink which is published by Preferred Publishers. Being shareware, we
expect you to pay for it if you use it, and the details of how to do that are
explained below. Being an advertisement, we hope you'll upgrade to Vantage if
you like McSink based on the really neat additional features you get with
Vantage. If you like McSink, you'll probably love Vantage.

    (Being an advertisement isn't as bad as it might sound. (It could be
much worse, by the way - it could be a demo version. You don't want any part of
the aggravations of using the demo version!) McSink is completely functional
except for those features which are only available in Vantage. By functional, I
mean usable for highly productive work. None of the disabled features prevents
you from using the guts of McSink/Vantage. The disabled features just make
things a lot nicer and easier.)

    So what are you missing by not upgrading to Vantage? Here's what:

• Vantage has automatic word wrapping. In addition, you can wrap to either the
window width, a specific line length, or to the width of the printed page.
Vantage's word wrapping has been highly optimized for speed and intelligent
window updating as wraps are performed.

• Vantage has macro capability. You can assign sequences of Vantage menu
commands, keystrokes, selections, and other miscellaneous functions to a macro
which appears as a named command under the Macro menu.

• Vantage has a built-in spelling checker. It's based on an 80,000 word
Merriam-Webster lexicon, and provides either batch or as-you-type spelling
checking. The guessing capability of the spelling checker is excellent and very
fast. You can correct either phonetically, typographically, or both. You can
also add your own words to the lexicon.

• Vantage can read text from MacWrite, Word, and WriteNow files. (Text only -
no formatting information.)

• Vantage supports External commands, called VCMDs. These are code fragments
that can be written by anyone in any language and installed into Vantage. (The
installer program is supplied with Vantage and looks a lot like Font/DA Mover.)
Installed VCMDs then appear under the Externals menu ready for use. A VCMD can
be written to do almost anything. (McSink also supports VCMDs, but you can only
load one at a time and whatever one you load will be forgotten the next time
you open McSink, whereas Vantage lets you permanently install up to 32 VCMDs so
that they are always available.) Here are some of the VCMDs that are supplied
with Vantage V2.0:

    * The Catalog VCMD allows you to catalog a disk or a folder. It can
optionally expand folders. The results of the Catalog are pasted into your
window's text, and the files in nested folders are nicely indented so that you
can quickly see your disk organization.

    * The Open Files VCMD allows you to open up a group of files into
Vantage windows all at one time. The files to be opened are specified by any
combination of a wildcard filename (like MS-DOS *.*), file type, or file
creator.

    * The Delete Files VCMD deletes a group of files in a folder. As in the
Open Files VCMD, the files to be deleted are specified by any combination of a
wildcard filename, file type, or file creator.

    * The Assign ESC Sequences VCMD allows you to assign escape key
sequences to Vantage menu items. For example, you could assign ESC-S to the
Stack Windows command.

    * The Curly Quotes VCMD will convert straight quotes in any portion of
your text to curly quotes. The Straight Quotes VCMD does the opposite.

    * There are also two VCMDs that allow you to grab an icon off the
screen and either paste the grabbed icon into your window as a hexadecimal text
item or copy the icon to the clipboard as a picture.

    * The ASCII Codes VCMD lets you enter any ASCII code into your text by
clicking on the codes in an ASCII chart.

    * The Sloppy Search VCMD allows you to search for words which are
"close" matches to a query word. Useful for finding words which you're not
quite sure how to spell.

    * The File Munger VCMD lets you do all kinds of neat things to groups
of files in a folder such as change their types and creators, convert from
foreign operating systems, etc.

    * The Sloppy Compare VCMD lets you compare two windows ignoring any
differences in case and white space (spaces and tabs.)

    * The Join Files VCMD combines the data from multiple files into one
new file.

• Vantage supports externally supplied file filters called VFILs, which allow
Vantage to read text from documents created by applications whose format
Vantage does not normally support. For example, if Word 5.0 suddenly appears on
your doorstep, you won't need a whole new Vantage to read it - just a Word 5.0
VFIL.

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            How to register or order:
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The McSink registration fee is $45.00. For that you get a passable manual and
limited support. The Vantage purchase price is $70.00. For that you get a
really nice manual and not limited support. Add a $6.50 shipping and handling
charge to either price. You can register or order by sending a check or money
order to:

        Preferred Publishers, Inc.
        5100 Poplar Ave., Suite 706
        Memphis, TN 38137

Or you can place orders using your MC, VISA, or AMEX card by calling:

        800-446-6393

Or if you just want information, you can call:

        901-683-3383

There's an ordering form in McSink's About dialog which you can paste into a
window and fill out easily. Use that to record all of the pertinent
information, print it, and send it along as your order.

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        Support your not-so-local shareware author:
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I'd really appreciate it if you'd register if you use McSink. (I wouldn't mind
if you register even if you don't use McSink, but that's asking a little much.)
Many of you have registered, and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you
for that.

I also strongly suggest that Vantage is well worth the price, and recommend
that new purchasers go straight to Vantage or old McSink users upgrade to it
from McSink. I don't just say that because I get more money from Vantage sales.
I really think Vantage's additional features are worth the price. The macros
and external VCMD features are well worth it, word wrap is real nice to have,
and maybe someday you'll even break down and use the spelling checker.


            Thank you,

                Dave McWherter, 1/25/90
                Signature Software
                    (for Preferred Publishers)


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