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Text File | 1995-01-02 | 19KB | 355 lines

CLI Guardian version 1.10 © Sam Kington 27th December 1994 This program is freeware, *not* public domain – i.e., I retain copyright (see “Boring legal message”) Existing users: see the ﬁle “Changes” for a list of changes since version 1.00. There’s quite a lot; I hope you like it ;). Terminology note **************** What the hell is the CLI, you may ask? And what do I mean by “CLI”? • “CLI” stands for Command Line Interface. • The CLI, under RISC OS, is the prompt you get for typing in “* commands” like *Modules, *Help Commands, *Set File$Type_FFF etc. You can get to the CLI in two ways: • By “shelling out” to the CLI – i.e. pressing F12. • By using a task window – i.e. pressing Ctrl-F12 But I will mostly describe the “CLI” as the F12 version – or rather, whenever there are pejorative connotations, it’s the non-multi-tasking version ;). I will occasionally describe *commands as ‘commands’ – I mean the same thing. What this program does ********************** CLI Guardian, as its name suggests, provides a way of avoiding shelling out to the CLI, by making three important aspects of RISC OS desktop-friendly: module handling, help handling, and *commands. It provides a list of modules, that you can look at and sort in different ways, as well as doing various things to (killing them, re-initialising them, loading them into RAM etc.) – hopefully, anything you would do with modules that you had to use the CLI before, you can do with CLI Guardian. It also allows you to view help strings, either from *Help or from BASIC, in a window, and to move, in a pseudo-hypertext fashion, between references (for *Help only, NB). (If you’re not sure what I mean by this, see later on in this ﬁle). Finally, you can enter *commands, and either run them in a Task Window or view the output in one of CLI Guardian’s viewers, and you can have other tasks like Director ask CLI Guardian to run a command as well. When you run CLI Guardian, it puts an icon on the icon bar, and starts building its list of modules. The machine will multitask, but will run a bit slower, until it ﬁnishes doing all this. This is only really noticeable if you’re typing away or dragging things or that sort of thing; certainly, in a boot sequence you won’t notice it. The program supports interactive help, so this documentation will only cover the various aspects of the program that don’t ﬁt in a small Help message. Modules ******* Clicking on CLI Guardian’s icon will open a list of modules to the left of the screen. By default it will be a simple list of modules, in the standard system order (i.e. ROM modules ﬁrst, then RAM modules in the order they were loaded), called in this program “sort by number”. Clicking on any of the modules will bring up a window with the various help options provided by the module; clicking on those will bring up the appropriate help message (see below). The window will also include any SWIs the module provides, but this is purely for information – it is exceedingly unlikely that there will be any help available on them. Unavailable modules (i.e. unplugged or dormant ROM modules) will be displayed in grey or in italics, depending on whether you are using the system font or not (see “Choices”). Clicking MENU on the Modules window will bring up the main menu, where you can set the display options, perform the standard operations on modules, save the module to disc, change the choices (colours, fonts, mouse clicks, mouse drags), save a copy of the window to disc and rescan the modules if they get out of synch. CLI Guardian knows several things about any particular module: its “official” name (e.g. “ColourTrans”), its “friendly” name (e.g. “Colour Selector”), its version number (e.g. 1.07 (15 Apr 1992), its status (e.g. “ROM (active)”), its size, and possibly a “special” ﬁeld (usually a copyright notice). You can see these in the Info box off the “Module” submenu, or by using interactive help on the Modules window. You can choose to display them in various combinations in the module window, by using the “Display” submenu, so you could have a sparse display of just official module names, or a big massive display with friendly name, size, status, version number and special ﬁeld. The only limitation is that they must be in the order “name - size - status - version - special”, and that you can’t have both sorts of names at the same time – mainly because they’re often not very different at all. I don’t think this is too much of a problem, but if you *are* seriously miffed by this, please tell me. Please note that the size of a module is just the size the code takes in the module area; it may also have workspace in the module area, the system area, the sprite area or elsewhere, which may often be quite extensive (the Window Manager usually uses 100K of workspace, and tracker modules also use massive amounts). You can also sort the modules in various ways: sort by name (alphabetical sort, using the official name), sort by number (standard sort, ROM modules ﬁrst then RAM modules in the order they were loaded), sort by date, sort by size and sort by version number. CLI Guardian will ﬁnd a list of modules quite quickly, but ﬁnding out the friendly name, version etc. and sorting the modules takes longer, which is why it will do this in the background. This lets you get at the machine quicker, but it has the side-effect that, if you are quick enough, you will see that some of the options are temporarily unavailable (greyed out). Also, if you have chosen to sort the modules by version (for instance), they will be displayed sorted by number for quite a while, until CLI Guardian ﬁnishes sorting them by version number. This happens when you ﬁrst start CLI Guardian, or when you rescan the modules. For this reason, you are recommended to put CLI Guardian in your Boot sequence, near the end, so it can work away when you ﬁrst start up your machine and be ready when you want to use it. The speed loss, when the machine is grinding away loading things anyway, is not particularly noticeable. (Note: rescanning will also delete any current windows and give away any claimed memory. So, if CLI Guardian grabs all the available memory – this can happen sometimes with strange modules – choose “rescan”.) Help **** As mentioned above, clicking SELECT (by default) on the Modules window will ﬁnd all the help options supplied by the module – help on commands, conﬁguration options, or other miscellaneous help – and display them in a window. Clicking on any of these options will in turn bring up a window with the corresponding help text; clicking in that will try and ﬁnd help using the words in the line of text clicked on, and so on ad inﬁnitum (or rather, until you reach the limit of 16 windows). As mentioned previously, you are unlikely to ﬁnd any help on SWIs. What is actually happening, is that when you click on a line of text, CLI Guardian passes the line to *Help, and displays the result – even if the actual line wasn’t *intended* to be clicked on like that. For instance, if you click on “UtilityModule” (or “MOS Utilities” if you have chosen “Show friendly name”), a rather large window will appear with a list of keywords, divided into two sections, “Commands” and “Help only”. This is nothing more than a nicer form of what you would get if you typed *Help UtilityModule from the command line (although sometimes there may be slight differences – CLI Guardian is sometimes more robust with badly-written modules). However, if you clicked on “Conﬁgure”, another window would appear, with the heading “Help on keyword Conﬁgure” and a list of Conﬁgure keywords provided by modules. If you go down to the keywords provided by “Territory Mgr”, which should be something like “Territory DST NODST TimeZone”, and click on that line, you will get a further window with four sections, “Help on keyword Territory”, “Help on keyword DST”, etc., with the appropriate help text. If you click on a heading, CLI Guardian will get help on all the lines between the heading and the next heading (or the end of the page if there isn’t one). This works quite well for the ﬁrst window you get, where the *Commands are lined up neatly under the heading “Commands”, but is rather more messy in other, unformatted windows. In particular, if the word “Commands” features anywhere between the heading and the next one, then you will get the output of *Help Commands – which is quite long :(. To sum up: What you have here is a (rudimentary) form of hypertext. The best way to ﬁnd out what you can do with it is to experiment. Clicking MENU on any window other than the Modules window will bring up a smaller window, with three options, “Help”, “Command” and “Save”. The ﬁrst two are equivalent to clicking Select or Adjust on the window; the third brings up a Save box where you can save the contents of the windows to a ﬁle or an application. Choosing “Help...” from the icon bar menu will bring up a small dialogue box where you can enter Help keywords; clicking “OK” will bring up a Help window in the usual manner. Note that you can also get help on BASIC keywords with this window (but *not* by clicking in a viewer window), by selecting “BASIC” rather than “RISC OS”. By default, Shift-Select-clicking on the icon bar icon will bring up the default Help window (i.e. with “RISC OS” selected), and Shift-Adjust will bring up the Help window with “BASIC” selected. This is purely for convenience, of course: you can still change mode by clicking on the icons as usual. Commands ******** Adjust-clicking (by default) on a viewer window (that is, any window other than the Modules window) or the icon bar will bring up a dialogue box where you can enter a * command. The window has three main parts: the “Command” writable ﬁeld, where you would enter the name of the actual command, four writable ﬁelds in the “Arguments” section, where you can enter various arguments of the command, and a set of icons. Note that CLI Guardian separates the “command” and “argument” parts of the *command string purely for clarity: for all intents and purposes, the command string still behaves as one long string, rather than up to ﬁve different bits of one. It’s difficult to describe here, so I won’t; it’s easiest to try it out and see for yourself. Note however that CLI Guardian assumes arguments are separated by spaces; this should be OK apart from a few old commands that still accept commas, but falls down when you include spaces within an argument. If this annoys you, sorry. Pressing F1 will toggle between the current command and the previous command – which is useful if you want to do the same command again, or a very similar one, and don’t want to re-type it. If that isn’t enough (it usually isn’t), then pressing F2 will show a command history in a CLI Guardian viewer. Or rather, it will if you have Olly Betts’ Line Editor running (and if you don’t, you should). Alternatively, you can *Type a file which contains your favourite commands, and use that as a history (there's a file called “History” in the CLI Guardian directory, which will be viewed if LineEditor isn’t running). CLI Guardian will also accept commands from other tasks: running the command CLIGuardCommand <command text> will do the job. There’s an example Menu file for Director in the CLI Guardian directory to show you how it works. If you drag a ﬁle to the Commands window, the full ﬁle-name will be inserted at the end of the command (i.e. in the last argument ﬁeld). Additionally, the “Help” button will provide help on the command (if there isn’t any help, you might not have typed it correctly); if the command is “Set”, “SetEval”, “SetMacro” or “Conﬁgure”, the “Value” button will show you the current value of the variable or the conﬁgure option you are about to change. “OK” and “Cancel” perform the expected actions: “Cancel” stops the whole thing, and “OK” runs the command, with the output going in a standard CLI Guardian window. The only exception is for “dangerous” commands: things like *Basic or *Debug that take over the machine, or things like *Map that take a long time – in other words commands that don’t return almost instantaneously or depend on updating the screen regularly. These will either be run as a separate task, or run in a Task Window. Finally, if you Adjust-click on a conﬁguration option in one of CLI Guardian’s viewers, CLI Guardian will insert the command “Conﬁgure <option>”, where <option> should be replaced by the name of the option, so “Conﬁgure” would be in the command field and “<option>” in the ﬁrst of the argument ﬁelds. Choosing “Command...” from the icon bar menu will also bring up the window. Choices ******* There are various ways you can customise CLI Guardian, notably by choosing how it displays modules (see “Modules” for more details). Other choices can be set with the “Choices” submenu: colours, fonts, mouse actions and mouse drags. CLI Guardian uses three styles in its windows: normal style, heading style and unavailable style. The normal style is applied to most text, the heading style to things like “Commands” or “Help on keyword Conﬁgure”, the unavailable style to modules like “BBC Econet” or “Joystick” if you don’t have the appropriate hardware. How these styles behave depends on whether you are using outline fonts or not. If you are using the system font, CLI Guardian uses colours to distinguish between styles (by default, red for headings and grey for unavailable modules). If you are using outline fonts, CLI Guardian won’t use colours; partly because non-anti-aliased fonts look ugly, and mainly because it’s a pain to do properly. The default fonts are Trinity.Medium for normal text, Trinity.Medium.Italic for unavailable text, and Homerton.Bold for headings. You can’t change the size because a) it would look silly, and b) it’s much easier to assume a font is a certain size. 12 point is about the same size as the System font, and as the point size of a font is a measure of its height (more or less), the lines should be spaced out correctly (well, they are on my machine, will all the fonts I’ve tried). You might get lines spilling over the edge of the window, but I suspect that would be with strange fonts like “FancyDress”. Obviously, Dingbats, MathGreek or other symbol fonts will look rather silly... You can also change the action of various mouse clicks, assigning mouse clicks to mouse actions, by choosing “Mouse clicks...” from the “Choices” submenu; a window will appear, with the available commands and the corresponding mouse click. For instance, if you click on the icon bar icon, you can open the Modules window, enter a Help keyword, or enter a * command; clicking on a window can search for help on the chosen line, use that line as a command, bring up a save box or close the window. Obviously, with several commands available and only two mouse buttons, you have to use Shift, Ctrl or maybe even Alt if you want to be able to do all these things with the mouse, so you can choose which ones are the most important to you. You can save these choices, cancel changes, and revert to default settings with the menu. Finally, you can also tell CLI Guardian to run certain commands when ﬁles of a given type are dragged to the icon. You can do this by editing the “FileDrags” ﬁle within the CLI Guardian window (there are menu options to do this), which contains lines like the following: SetMacro CLIGuard$RunType_FF9 IconSprites <CLIGuard$File> SetMacro CLIGuard$RunType_1000 Filer_OpenDir <CLIGuard$File> To set the options, CLI Guardian runs the ﬁle as an Obey ﬁle, setting the special variables, similar to Alias$@RunType_xxx variables. The variable “CLIGuard$File” contains the full name of the ﬁle dragged to the icon; “FF9” or “1000” are the numerical values of the appropriate ﬁletype (1000 for a directory, 2000 for an application). Choosing “Edit drag ﬁles” from the Choices window will load the ﬁle into a text editor, where you can edit and save the new ﬁle; choosing “Reload drag ﬁles” will run the ﬁle, setting the appropriate system variables. Boring legal message ******************** This application is freeware, that is, it can be distributed freely as long as only reasonable charges are made for media and distribution. I retain copyright on all program code and documentation. This software is supplied “as is”: I make no warranty, expressed or implied, of the merchantability of this software or its ﬁtness for any particular purpose. In no circumstances shall I be liable for any damage, loss of proﬁts, or any indirect or consequential loss arising out of the use of this software or inability to use this software, even if I have been advised of the possibility of such loss. In other words, if your computer crashes, blows up, you lose all your work etc. all because of CLI Guardian (unlikely I know), don’t blame me. About all these strange foreign characters in this ﬁle ******************************************************* OK, so if you’re reading this on a PC or a Mac or another strange machine like that, you may be wondering what all these strange ae things are. Well, they’re quotes (sorry, there was another one), dashes, ligatures, etc. Honest. But not on all machines... Basically, character sets are only standard up to character 127, which is basically alphanumerics and a few standard punctuation marks. Foreign characters, typographical oddities like quotes and ligatures, and other more obscure symbols are “non-standard”, and each computer often has its own idea of where they should go in the character set. So don’t worry: even if it’s hard to read on your current machine, it won’t be on an Acorn machine. It may look slightly strange if you’re using the System font, however. But why am I using these strange characters in the ﬁrst place? Well, they’re in the character set and they look nice in an outine font, and I’ve written a program called Smart Quotes (sorry for the plug) that substitutes these sort of characters automatically, and I’ve got it turned on at the moment... How to contact me ***************** All bug-reports, suggestions, comments or indeed any feedback at all will be welcomed. Here’s how to get to me: E-mail : 926286ki@udcf.gla.ac.uk during term-time These should be OK until June 1996 I (probably) won’t be at Glasgow during the holidays, but mail will be automatically forwarded to wombat@altern.com, which is my French email address. Snail-mail : My term-time address, at least until June 1995, is: Sam Kington Flat 2/1 44 Hotspur Street Glasgow G20 8NL SCOTLAND Again, a backup is the home address – anything that goes here will get to me eventually. Sam Kington Merlhiot 24420 Savignac les Eglises FRANCE Term-time is October to June, with bits off at Christmas (3 weeks) and Easter (4 weeks).