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Text File | 1994-12-17 | 83KB | 1,658 lines

MR/2 - A QWK Compatible Mail Reader for OS/2. 12/17/94 Copyright (c) 1994, Knight Writer Software Company. All rights reserved. =================================================================== N O T I C E =================================================================== This IS a shareware package, and does require a registration fee if you choose to continue using it after 30 days. The registration fee is currently $25 US. Eventually, the product MAY have a "begging" screen with a key-file that will register the software and suppress it. The more interest I get, the more likely I am to continue with improvements. ------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTACTING THE AUTHOR ===================== You can contact me in a number of ways. Unfortunately, I can't provide a phone number at this time. US Mail: Nick Knight 1823 David Ave. Parma, Ohio 44134 Fido netmail: 1:157/2 to "Nick Knight" Internet: User "Nick Knight", (nick.knight@pcohio.com) Fido Echomail: Find the Fidonet OS2PRODSUPPORT conference. I'm there. Echomail messages to me in more general conferences are discouraged, as keeping them "on topic" and interesting to the masses would be difficult. I do read OS2, OS2PROG, C_PLUSPLUS and DR DEBUG daily, though. OFFLINE echo also (deals with mail readers), this might be THE place to ask public questions, eh? I recently have acquired access to a host of other networks with OS/2 conferences. These include RIME, SmartNet, Uninet, Intelec, Nanonet, Racenet and some others I can't remember. I also do poll the Fidnet OS2PRODSUPPORT echo. Direct BBS: Leave a message on the Nerd's Nook BBS (1:157/2) at (216) 356-1772, 356-1872 or 356-1431. I check in here multiple times a day. I will also keep the most recent copy of MR/2 posted here. Other boards (non-local) will get updates at my convenience. Internet FTP: Well, during normal business hours, 8-5 or later EST, my work machine is on the internet. I have an anonymous FTP "site" setup as a directory on my machine. This is a hit-or-miss proposition, but you can try it. Ftp to nick.raleigh.com. You can upload bugs, packets, notes, whatever. AGAIN, this will only be available when our company SLIP connection is up, when our LAN Server network is running, and when my machine is on (almost always). It's very "hit or miss". ************************************************************************** ************************************************************************** ** NOTE: Nerd's now supports an MR/2 conference ** ** and file area. Conference #208 is dedicated to ** ** MR/2 support and files. File area #45 contains ** ** MR/2-related files. Any file uploaded into ** ** conference 208 will be placed in file area 45. ** ************************************************************************** ************************************************************************** Nerd's does support file requests (157/2 or 157/3) Compuserve: I check only once a week or thereabouts. Try mail to my user ID - 76066,1240, although internet mail has proven to be a faster approach. Changes included in v2.15 ------------------------- Still a beta. I'll call v2.2 a "real" release. In the meantime, I'll continue to poke with large, currently-working features :) o Had to modify the messaging-viewing support code to handle much longer search strings. Most routines had support for 80-100 character match strings, and MR/2's search engine now allows 255 characters. If you used a longer string, many strange things would happen. Seems to work now. o I massively modified the VC file handling system. Again. I tested fairly thoroughly, and my time trials showed an extremelly minimal improvement. Considering all that I did, I'm pretty dissappointed :(. BUT, my system is massively-double-cached ... meaning I have large OS/2 disk caches, on top of a caching IDE controler with 4 MB of cache RAM. Hopefully there are some *real* improvements resulting from this, and my machine's just not the best for showing these. Details follow. o Modified the string matching logic added in v2.14 to be more efficient. Some work on the conference matching parser also. o Changed the VC process so that it opens a large-buffered FILE structure instead of sharing the main process's open, raw file handle. o Changed the way VC index files are opened and written too. Previously, only one index file could be open at a time, and a process of closing the current one and opening the "next" one in append mode was used. I now open each index file once and it remains open until all VC's are built. I then close ALL index files at this time. Index files were converted to use raw file handle output as opposed to the previous buffered-stream mode. I dynamically change the maximum allowed count of file handles to facilitate this change. If this fails, the old method is used as a backup. o When building of virtual conferences is complete, MR/2 now invoked the command file "SaveVCs.CMD", if it exists in the MR/2 home directory. The current version of this cmd file pkzip's ALL modified NDX files back into the original packet. This happens as a BACKGROUND process, invoked using the "start /b /c" command. This has two benefits: Virtual conference NDX files are saved with the packet, so that VC's are built only once per the life of the packet. Any subsequent opening of this packet will already have the VC structure intact and available for instant reading. Packets without NDX file altogether will now have ALL MR/2-created NDX files saved for subsequent opens. For example, the QWK packets produced by MR/2's MQWK packet merging utility do not include NDX files. Each time you would open a packet created with this utility, MR/2 would build the NDX files from scratch. This is now required ONLY the very first time the packet is opened. NOTES: If the command file processing fails, the only harm should be that the NDX files are missing from the QWK packet. That's no different than what happened previously; MR/2 will just try again the next time the packet is opened. If this new system is undesirable for any reason, simply remove (delete) "SaveVCs.cmd" from the MR/2 directory. Changes included in v2.14 ------------------------- BETA! Everything here is very new and, although, I've been using it every day, is bound to have a problem or two. NOTE: Old VC strings may not work as they used to. It's IMPORTANT and very simple to fix this ... Make String = \word1\word2\word 3 into String = "\word1\word2\word 3" and all will work as it did in the past. Only strings containing embedded spaces need to be wrapped in quotes. o I *think* I have a personal internet FTP site set up on my machine! :) See "Contacting the author", above. o Previously, the bbsname.cfg file for a specific BBS was overwritten with a packets control.dat file, regardless of the age of the packet being opened. If the packet was a year old, that BBS would then have a year old CFG file saved for it. MR/2 now copies only if the "new" file has a newer date than the existing file. o Modified the Virtual Confenence builder's "Conferences" command to accept both ranges and text wild card strings. For example, the following Conferences commands will now work: (NULL) or * All conferences 1,2,3,4 1 2 3 or 4 1-4 1 through 4 1-4,100,200,1000- 1->4, 100, 200 or 1000 and greater -1000 through 1000 alt*,comp* all named starting with alt or comp !200,alt*,comp* all named starting with alt or comp EXCEPT 200 !200-300,!17,alt*,comp* starting with alt or comp EXCEPT 200-300 and 17 EXCEPTIONS SHOULD COME FIRST as first "match" terminates the check *.* any confernce with a dot in its name 17,254,alt.*,comp.* all alt/comps and conferences 17 and 254 *-R, *-F All conferences ending in -R or -F. For PC-Ohio, this would be all RIME or FIDONET conferences, respectively. "Negatives" are available to exclude certain conferences by number or name. As the above states, negatives or excluded conferences should be listed first, as the first criteria the conference fits in causes the routine to cease checking. For example: !100-150,1-1000 will include conferences 1 through 99 and 151 through 1000. Any conference from 100 through 150 will fit the first catagory, which is negated/excluded, so messages in these conferences will NOT be included. However: 1-1000,!100-150 This will include all conferences 1 through 1000. Since any message in the range 100-150 will first qualify as a match for the first range, the second range will never cause a message to be excluded. The first example is the correct way to exclude conferences. NOTE: The support of ranges and wildcards has caused a slowdown in the creation of VC's. While "minimal", I plan to add some code to support original-style Conferences commands using the old method. The most efficient commands will consist of singular numbers. Next in up in efficiency would be numeric ranges. NOTE that, where large ranges are concerned (more than 50 conferences?), this is more efficient than individual listings. Finally, wildcard and/or text-strings matches are CPU-intensive, and will cause slower VC building. Still, the flexibility offered by wildcards and numeric ranges far outweigh the "small" cost in performance. The decision is left to you. o Boolean match logic is now available for both virtual conferences and real-time (F, ALT-F) searching. The "old" method of or'ing strings together is still supported, although I'm having some problems with this. Perhaps an INI variable later ... Keywords can be OR'd together, AND'd together and/or NOT'd. In addition, parenthesis can be used to control the evaluations of the test. There is also an operator that will match a word, remaining sensitive to case. I've also added support for quoted strings so that spaces and the special boolean operator symbols can still be searched for. Some simple examples: (OS/2 | OS2) & !WARP (OS/2 or OS2) and not warp Windows & OS/2 Windows and OS/2 Windows | OS/2 Windows or OS/2 ^warp warp, but ONLY if all lower case letters The "operator" symbols follow the conventions used by C and C++ for boolean operations: & is the AND operator | is the OR operator ! is the NOT operator () cause the expression inside to be evaluated as a single expression. and one other that I added: ^ causes a case-sensitive match to be performed. The word that follows must be found with matching capitalization to be concidered a "match". The following will find all messages that contain one of two different words referencing OS/2 that also mentions "bugs". if the message doesn't match under this criteria, then it is tested for the words "Windows" and "slow" in the same messages: ((OS/2 | OS2) & bugs) | (Windows & slow) The following is somewhat similar. It will also find all messages that contain one of two different words referencing OS/2 that also mentions "bugs". If the message is found to match, then it is tested for the words "Windows" and "slow" in the same messages. If these words are both found, however, the message is eliminated (compliments of the "!" NOT operator): ((OS/2 | OS2) & bugs) & !(Windows & slow) When MR/2 displays a message that has bee "found", all words contained in the match string will be highlighted. A few more examples: ObjectPM | "Object PM" spaces are ignored unless witin quotes "R&D" operator characters must be in quotes if part of a search string. R&D finds the single letters R and D, anywhere in the message. This *isn't* what you want! "(ch | 0xFF)" more special characters within quotes. The operator characters will be treated as any other characters. """Windows""" Looks funny? It will find the Windows in message but only if between quote marks. Two quotes together are treated as a single " mark, but they must still be part of an entire quoted string. Tricky? Maybe. Just know that ... ""Windows"" WILL NOTE WORK, and that ... "can you say ""neighbor""?" will find the prase 'can you say "neighbor"?' The word neighbor mus be within quotes to be concidered a match. "&Windoze" Soundex search for anything sounding similar to "Windows". ^warp | phasers Looks for the word "warp" in all lower case ONLY, or the word "phasers" ^NT | ^Nick Looks for the capital letters "NT" or the string "Nick" where only the N is capitalized. MAXIMUM seach criteria length for VC's is 256 bytes (after the "=" marker). All must be on a single line. Nesting is supported further than anyone will need it (limitted only by stack space). Other ideas are in head ... let me know if you come up with any handy and/or clever ideas :) o The old stuff. I've got all of my old w1\w2\w3 strings working as-is, but there were problems with embedded spaces that used to be seen as significant parts of the string. They aren't any more. To get search strings that include spaces to work, simply wrap the ENTIRE string inside quotes. For example: String = "TekRam\DC-6\DC6\Promise\Caching IDE" These will probably be "unsupported" quickly, as they're part of the reason that performance is down (checking for or's in two places now). o Expands the FIND criteria entry forms to hold much longer search-for strings. I also saw that this was another case where light red on white was being used. Changed to dark-red on white. Much easier to see! o The mouse, when set in single-click mode was totally unusable with selection lists. Fixed. o NOTE that my tests show that I've slowed down the creation of virtual conferences by 10-20%. I have applied several optimizations and rearranged, and this has helped. I see room for a couple of major performance enhancements, and those will be applied next. Changes included in v2.13 ------------------------- o Help screen for the editor was STILL missing the ALT-* (paste) key combination. Added. o Lots of questions about FolderOrder. Past Docs don't clearly state all the possibilities. MessageOrder and SortOrder can have values of: Subject, DateTime, From, To or MessageNumber. o SplitLongReplies = YES would not work ... you would have to specify a line count, otherwise the response was read as NO. Fixed. o I spent quite awhile with a user, trying to figure out why his internet replies weren't working correctly (they weren't using the INTERNET template, although all appeared to be setup correctly). Turns out he had HeaderEditing set to AFTER. This usually won't work. I now check for this conflict and change HeaderEditing to BOTH if either INTERNET or NETMAIL conferences have been specified. I *do* post a warning on the first message of each session, and explain how to remedy this. There is still a potential problem with RIME routing (no way to specify PRIVATE before a reply to a public message is created with HeaderEditing set to BEFORE), but this is more difficult to detect. I will create and post on Nerd's a "How to ..." document. This will save me a ton of time in the future, as most of my support efforts have been in this area. When questions arise, I'll simply send this boilerplate as a message. o More minor example template tweaks. Removed a couple of lingering references to my last name, added another example of a netmail routing line. There are now three routing lines for a netmail message, *one* of them should be correct (most cases should be covered). o ADD/DROP was broken due to the change to 5-digit conference support. Fixed this ... hopefully that's the last bug caused by this change. I also cleaned up the ADD/DROP prompt (conference name was 1 char off ... cosmetic, all related to the 5-digit change). Changes included in v2.12 ------------------------- o Editing a reply and saving it would (sometimes) cause a crash when the reply conference was exitted. This was non-destructive; the reply would be OK, it was a function of the new sorting that was slightly off. Fixed. Changes included in v2.11 ------------------------- BETA as far as I'm concerned. Seems to work just fine for me, but I changed lots of basic, its-been-working-forever code. Please do not distribute widely ... and report any problems immediately. If all checks out, I'll post it widely next weekend. o MQWK.CMD - added and tested command lines for using zip/unzip (InfoZip utilities). Tested with the DOS versions; assuming command lines are the same. Comment out the first set of lines, uncomment out the second. NOTE that zip failed when run with the "start" command so as to run it in the background. It seems zip wants to open the source file in a mode that conflicts with the fact that MR/2 also has it open. Too bad; the PK utilities work OK this way. o More minor tweaks to the conference index builder. Someone complained recently, so I thought I'd have a look. I see room for some *big* improvements! :) o When modifying a reply, the fact that the NEW reply had a later date than the OLDER version would case the message pointer to seem to "shift" to another message. This was after you would save the reply ... the message viewer showed something different. This would only happen if other replies had a matching subject. I now sort the reply headers differently. I disregard date/time when sorting after a reply-modify. o Ooops. Forgot to list Ctrl-O on the Editor help screen. Fixed. o I modified the conference header sort massively. It now uses a btree sort with minimal data movement. This fix, in addition to the other little tweaks a day or two ago, result in a great speed boost. My informal testing (watching the MR/2 clock tick away) involved loading one 800 message conference, and another with 402 messages. The larger conference took 15 seconds to load with the old MR/2, it now takes about 5. The smaller conference's time dropped from 6 seconds to about 2-3. The larger the conference, the bigger the difference will be. Smaller conferences will show smaller improvements. Overall, things are just *much* faster. o Converted all internal storage and formats to support 5 digit conference numbers, as long as these numbers remain in the 16-bit range (up to 65,635). A user reported a BBS system that used thousands as a group identifier, and the remainder as the sub-sconference number. This was a big change, and I'll test thoroughly before releasing. o Packet selection screen was expanded 2 characters and underlying logic modified to support packets from BBS's with 8 characters names, and with 2 digit TE/2-style collision suffixes. For example, NERDNOOK.QWK;99 could not be opened, renamed or passed to MQWK.CMD when merging packets. This appears to be working better. o Another error dialog has been added. This one agains warns if the working directory has been specified on a different-but-valid drive (a potential problem). There's even one more problem to detect; as MR/2 requires the work directory to be a subdirectory off of its "base" location. This would occur rarely, and is not destructive, whereas the one that are now detected and avoided were. o Added a third level sort to the subject thread sort procedure. Threads are now sorted by Subject, then date/time, then message number. As reported, split message all may have the same date/time, and this usually assures that they appear correctly. o Editing a message header, then requesting to "pick a conference" from the master list. Previously, typing letters did not jump to the first prefix match. Fixed. o Add in a new INI parameter for myself - FolderOrder. This has the same parameters as MessageOrder, but allows a different sort to be applied to the ReplyLog and Inbasket. I found myself constantly converting these folders to date/time sort, so I decided to add an option to default the sort for just these folders. NOTE: By default, FolderOrder = -1, which means that the MessageOrder is used. Sort orders will work the same for everyone unless they specify this option specifically. o Further modified the message sorting ... if DATE/TIME sort is active, a secondary sort level of message number is activated. Same reasons as it was added as the 3rd level on subject sorting. o Revamped the INI parser once again. My while() loop kept growing, and I kept breaking the compiler. It's now broken into two separate routines, which gives me plenty of room for expansion, but also increases the possibility that bugs have been introduced. Changes included in v2.1 ------------------------ o I found rather large memory leak when using the internal editor. It seems that the cleanup routines ... something I've never looked at before and always *assumed* were just fine (NOTE: the editor started as a third party editor "toolkit", which I have modified extensively). Well, the cleanup routine was empty; totally empty. I added about 8 free() calls to release committed but unneeded memory. I found this when I went to add the "cleanup" counterpart for: o The internal editor now has an undo capability ... unlimitted levels. I keep a record of all block delete's and CTRL-X line deletes. You can use CTRL-U to insert the text in reverse order of the deletes. Inserts are always to the current cursor position. In a way, this can be used as an intra-document cut/paste. Each of the two editor buffers has its own undo-delete list. Let me know if you can think of any other place to store text for "undoing". I'll look through the code for more possibilities, too. NOTE that I do *not* pay attention to presses of the delete key (for removing a character at a time). NOTE: CTRL-U previously would delete a marked block. There are several other ways to do this, so I remapped this key. I hope this won't confuse anybody :) o Well, I finally had to fix the long-time Zortech file open bug, instead of dodging it. ZTC's fopen(), the call used often to open a file for reading and/or writing would NOT return NULL on error. This is a C/C++ standard - to return NULL if an open fails. I thought this was just a problem on open-for-reads, but I find that opening a file for write that fails (a bad file name or path, for example) STILL returns an "ok" value. This was masking the real reason one user's VC's were crashing. Not that I know the real reason, yet, but the diagnostics that have always been there can now work. I cleaned them up further, and tested them using a hand-made bad file name. In this example, instead of crashing whenever the VC thread hits its first message, a polite failure message *should* display on the screen. The VC process will terminate if ever an open fails. Now, to see what file name this user's system is trying to open ... :) o I love the Internet! :) In a single 24 hour period, I was able to exchange private mail with the aforementioned user a couple of times, actually upload a test MR2.EXE to his machine via ftp (I don't yet have personal access like this - a friend "demoed" it to me :). There was still enough time to get the tell-all error message back from him! If you specified a fully-qualified WorkPath, either in the INI file OR on the command line (for example, WorkPath=C:\mr2\Work or /WC:\mr2\Work, the VC index building process would crash. I now handle this for both cases. o In testing the above, I happened to try a drive/path that didn't exist at all. I used /WJ:\mr2\tmp, where the J drive is non-existent on my machine. I picked a packet (of pickled peppers? ... oh, sorry, long day :), MR/2 pathed to the defined work dir, which of course failed, and then proceeded to clean out the directory. The directory it cleaned out happened to be my MR/2 home directory (source code and all). Bummer! Good thing I keep great backups and hadn't done much work since I backed up! And I remember arguing with a user publicly that MR/2 wouldn't delete files unless the chdir succeeded. Ooops. NOW, if the change directory fails, a nice 10-12 line dialog box pops up, explains the problem, shows you your workpath, then promptly exits w/out deleting a single thing. o Modified the edit header logic slightly. When editing a message header where the original message's "from" field is blank, MR/2 now tries to use the @Internet@ value for the TO field. I've received mail before this way, and when I replied, my message had a blank TO field and was uploaded to the BBS this way. The message made it to its destination, but since PCBoard views a blank TO as being equivelant to "ALL", everyone else on my BBS could read it. In other words, it was not PRIVATE on my home board. Since PCBoard ignores the TO line if there's a TO: line in the message, I could have put anything there, but the INTERNET address (truncated) seemed appropriate. o Minor internal editor fixups ... things like names on the top of both editor windows are correct and stay that way, the search prompt now stays at the title bar or the "owner" window. o I modified the Editor=Internal INI options to accept another parameter. Editor=Internal,FullScreen (or just the work "FULL") puts the editor into full-screen mode. This uses ALL display lines when editing a file instead of leaving the source message header displayed. o When switching the Editor specification in MR2.INI back and forth between Internal, ME/2 and/or an external editor, MR/2 would sometimes ignore the requested change until restarted from scratch. This works much better now, except ME/2 still doesn't shut down after it is no longer the requested editor. Minor nit - I'll fix it eventually. o When MR/2 packs the folders, a check is made to see if the folder file is empty (size equal to 128 bytes). If it is, the file is removed. Also, MR/2 will try to remove any BBS-specific folder directory on packet exit. If the directory has *anything* in it, the remove will fail (as it's supposed to). If empty, as is sometimes the case, the directory will disappear. This will prevent the system from collecting directories for BBS's for which no data is stored in a folder. o Subject sorting was modified to make DATE/TIME the secondary sort field, rather than message number. I made a bold assumption that the other way would never really give the desired affect and that (as many have requested), DATE/TIME is indeed the proper second sort option. If anyone disagrees, please speak up and I'll add BOTH choices as options. o When using the INI parameter SourceFile, MR/2 now starts in the reply buffer with ALL of the text in the source file marked. A simple ALT-C or ALT-M will copy/move the block into the reply. o The default template file "Subject:" line for NewInternet was changed from @ISUBJECT@ to @SUBJECT@. This will keep MR/2 from "inventing" long internet subjects and will instead insert the SUBJECT value from the message header. You can modify the subject in the message while editing, if desired. o Another memory leak plugged - this time in deleting the list of conference message headers. There was also an unneeded call to lookup and format the Conference name in this loop. This was removed (microscopic speed improvement). Changes included in v2.09A -------------------------- Another short-lived release; v2.09 had a serious bug. I offer this release quicker-than-planned to ward off potential problems. I still plan on a bunch more minor fixes, fixing anything else that turns up wrong with the next internal editor changes, and releasing v2.1 in, say, another week? o Modified the folder-packing process. This procedure often left unattached "source" messages in the log well after the parent message was gone. I've written a little checker/diagnostic utility to help me watch how well this works, so I'll be watching closely. o Ooops! Ctrl-S from within the internal editor did nasty things. It did save the work to disk, but then it closed the file and cleaned up. This caused later saves to fail. Fixed. o Initial MR/2 startup now uses the internal editor instead of E. Don't know why I didn't switch to this before. o MR/2 used the E editor as the default if not specified. Now it's the internal editor. o Modified the help subsystem slightly - HELP works when editing the INI file with the internal editor. o Modified the default colors specified in the default MR2.INI file. Message text was in yellow, now it's in bright-white and the HEADER data is in yellow. I like this better. o Modified the default first-time startup code to copy example.tf to template.tf, if template.tf is not found. Template.tf is the default template file specified in MR2.INI. Previously, if a new user did not put out the effort, templates would not be used ... the INI simply specified a template file that did not exist. Now one *will* exist. o Modified the example.tf file and removed all references to my name :). In place of my name, I've inserted the string @Mix@@UserName@. This takes the user name from the QWK packet, mixes the case and signs all message that way. For "Reply-To:" lines in internet templates, I simply left this blank. If the user gets this far, he can edit the template and fill this in himself. o Another pathing patch so that, when using ME/2 as your editor, pressing ALT-C to edit MR2.INI works ok. Changes included in v2.09 ------------------------- o Better protection and diagnostics for read_line overflows. All of my sequential file (text) access to read a "line" are now protected by a "max" count value. If this value is met, a crude warning is displayed, a keypress is requested, and the line is truncated. This has been the suspected cause of a large number of unsolvable crashes ... any files that gets corrupted or modified when CR/LF's are removed can cause this. Now, at least there is a warning, some information, and no crash. o Trying to solve an obscure VC crash for a user, I made minor changes to the VC search process. Just for my information/reference later :) o Ooops. I temporarily saved the SplitLongReplies value in a character variable. That caused overflow/rounding, so that specifying 300 line messages resulted in 44 line messages (300-256=44). You could not get messages longer than 256 lines. Fixed. o When saving a message (or BBS file) to a save file, entering a bad or invalid file name would show no error message or indication of a problem, even though the save failed. This has been corrected to where MR/2 will beep and stay at the file name prompt until a valid save file name is specified, or ESCAPE is pressed. o I somehow readded the problem where matching conference names failed to insert the second name in the master conference list. This is, again, fixed. o If you opened a packet with existing replies, unpacked them, then killed all replies (so no active replies remained), MR/2 would exit and leave the original reply packet intact. It is now removed (renamed to a .old) and none of the killed replies are registered in the reply log. o Cosmetic: left over garbage in background when a "no packets exist" box is displayed has been removed. o If no BBS .cfg files existed, MR/2 would display a message about not having any QWK packets available. Fixed. o Internal editor work - LOTS of it :). I'm not telling yet! :) (Just in case bugs are found with what "used to work" ...) o Ok, fine. I'll tell you about the editor. I'll put this out for some user-testing, then issue v2.1 when it appears all the kinks are out. I will add INI variables to specify full screen editing (all 25 lines) and initial split-window sizing. - Optional 2-buffer, split window editing. First, if you add the INI parameter SourceFile=somename.txt, MR/2 will automatically go into full screen, split window editing mode on reply. If you don't do this, the editor starts off looking the same, but new keys are enabled: CTRL-O Open a new file (in the secondary buffer only) prompts for file name, asks if save old one if modified *This ALWAYS opens the file into the TOP, extra window/buffer* CTRL-D Divide the editing screen into 2 equal parts CTRL-C Close/Hide the current editor Window (if split only) CTRL-G Grow the current window to full size (if split only) CTRL-S Save the current file CTRL-UP Move the divider bar up one line CTRL-DOWN Move the divider bar down one line CTRL-PAGEUP Expand the bottom window all the way CTRL-PAGEDOWN Expand the top window all the way ALT-N Give the NEXT editor buffer the focus (split or two full screens - Shift F3 works, too) ALT-C will now copy *across* windows. If nothing is marked in the current window, the other window is checked for a mark. ALT-M will do the same; if text is not highlighted in the current window, it will check the "other" window, cut the marked text and paste it to the current cursor position. Sorry, I had to change some things: FIND was remapped to CTRL-F (from CTRL-S) FIND NEXT was remapped to CTRL-N (from CTRL-F) And, for compatibility with ME/2: ALT-X Save and exit whole editor. If you don't do the SourceFile thing, then you can still open CTRL-O a file or two for reference. For example, just today, I CTRL-O opened MR2.DOC and cut a couple of lines from that. Same with a snip from pmmle.h. o Editor Help screen updated to show new key functions, also now includes clipboard access keys. o ME/2 USERS: I fixed it now so that ME/2 is initially loaded *after* MR/2 switches the path to the working directory. This means that the old ME/2 "erc 100 - reply.msg" error due to a pathing problem is fixed by default. Your old INI ReplyFile specs will work. If you're not using ME/2, this change *will not* effect you. Changes included in v2.08 ------------------------- o By request, and it made sense, the conference name is displayed at the top of the message index screen. I simply show the "packet id" string that is optionally shown on the message viewing screen. o I noticed that the reply header editing screen still was using that aweful light red color (on top of white) for the current field. I changed this to normal red, and I think it's much easier to read. o Also by request, when MR/2 clears the screen to pack replies, a simple message is posted informing you of this. On some system, the delay was significant, and with the screen totally blank, confusion resulted. The message is simple and modest; I depend on the archiver to write to stdout, and pretty-stuff wouldn't scroll off the screen nicely. o MR/2 would sometimes "lock up" when moving backwards through message by thread (using Ctrl-PageUp or backspace). This has been fixed. o Importing text into the internal editor (Alt-R) would often result in the cursor being shifted to the right one character from where keypresses would insert characters. This has been fixed. Changes included in v2.07 ------------------------- o Minor changes - mostly in the interface and communications between my external PM editor, ME/2. Changes included in v2.06 ------------------------- o Rime-routed messages that were long enough to be split missed the auto-routing line placement logic on secondary parts. I was looking for too exact a match on "RIME". Also, I keyed on "Postlink" within the original message to tell if it was routed. Editing the header on pass two, the original message was no longer available. Anyway, fixed :) o Added support for ME/2, a PM-based editor I've been playing with. ME/2 is an MDI-based editor with toolbar, statusbar, multiple file windows, speller, thesaurus, simple printing ... tons of features. I'm putting it out at the same time as this (ME2_099.zip). If you use ME/2 as your editor, it is preloaded by MR/2 on startup. MR/2 can control it using IPC tricks, so response is better than you'd get with any normal PM editor. Session switching back and forth is handled automatically. See the me2.doc file included with the ME/2 distribution zip. o INI parameter added - "SourceFile". If specified, a source message that is being replied to will be quoted to this file, and the actual reply file will contain no quoted text, just an empty template read-to-complete. This is used by ME/2 as an option, and may be useful for other setups. Changes included in v2.05 ------------------------- o Resolution of the source Internet address enhanced slightly. I moved the check for PC-Boards @From: specifier before some of the others, as if this line is there, it's much more reliable than searching for the tokens like "From: ". Some of my recent replies detected invalid Internet addresses. This should help. (After a couple of replies, it does! :). o Setting extended attributes on packets stored on a LAN Server network drive would actually modify the datestamp. I added code to query the original date/time and then reset this *after* the EA's were applied. Seems to behave properly now. o I screwed up and overwrote a large, completely unread packet tonight. I was bummed. But wait! I now save the PTR file and can reset my pointers!! Only ... MR/2's saving mechanism seems to have been broken and I uploaded a 3 month old file. Needless to say, I got more messages than I needed! What a mess ... I had to reset all my pointers by hand and I know I missed some mail. I then fixed the date compare of PTR files. They should overwrite the existing one now, if newer, and do it correctly. For whoever it was that reported this and that I ignored ... you got your revenge! o MR/2 would crash when you pressed escape from the "NO PACKETS FOUND" message. Had something to do with the aggressive optimizations. I've "unoptimized" a bit until I can figure this out. o I made a slight goof when I fixed the recursive variable replacement in the last release. I made it so any *real text* with an "@" in it would get removed, whether it had a "\" proceeding it or not. You see, the "\" would *not* be there the second pass, so the "@" was unprotected. If there was a string between two @'s, this would be removed too, as it was assumed it was an invalid variable name. I now leave unresolved variables in the text as-is. This bug effected mostly fidonet and internet addresses. Fixed. Changes included in v2.04 ------------------------- NOTE: This version includes alot of optimization from compiler switches and from some rearranging of localized code. I used it personally for several weeks, and the only "problems" I saw were minor video (cosmetic) issues ... like a "black hole" for a second or two when one of the "use existing?" prompts comes down. I'll track this, but you may see it until the next version. The fixes in this release are beneficial, and the video problems just minor and cosmetic. I've also traced some recent slow downs to the folder subsystem; packing log files and building indices in particular. I do this way too often, and it takes too long. I will spend some time on these shortly, attempting to hit the disk far less than happens currently. o New INI variable "ALIAS" allows you to set a user name for yourself other than the one found in the BBS Control.dat file. This alias name will be placed in the FROM field of all your replies. Best used in a "local", BBS-specific INI file when accessing multiple BBS's. For Example: Alias=Billy-Bob will override the settings in Control.dat (say for this example the BBS name was "William B Gooden"). Replies would come from Billy-Bob. o Turns out that the @variable logic was not as recursive as I had advertised. For example, inserting a "phrase file" line that contained yet another variable to replace did not work. It does now :) o Fixed a crash when modifying replies (changing, killing ...). If the subject happenned to end in column 25 with a number BUT not be a "split reply", MR/2 would crash looking for the "/" in "x/n". For example "OS/2 <...> 2.11" would cause this crash to occur. o Reply log would not always be accessible without an existing packet. If you had no messages in your inbasket or replies for a specific BBS, ALT-E (No packet entry) would not allow access to the reply log. Fixed. o Some major under-the-hood work. I played around with some compiler switches that have always been there, but have remained undiscovered until now. <read: it sometimes pays to read the manual, even if it's 3 years late :>. I've compiled MR/2's code, including the speller, thesaurus and editor, with 286-or-better code generation turned on. The 386 code generator caused problems, and I still have some v1.3/286 users. One day I'll go full 32-bit, but not yet :) Also, I turned on some aggressive optimizations. I also recompiled the ZTC tools with these switches. I tried the C runtime library, but it showed some bad signs, so I switched back. All this does is provides a little more snap, and a 12k reduction in EXE size. Nothing revolutionary, but every bit helps. Changes included in v2.03 ------------------------- o ADD/DROP still had a problem whenever the DOOR and CONTROLNAME specifiers did not match (in dorr.id). Fixed. Cammail-Gold door configuration now works. o Reply logging would work wonderfully ... until you started replying to subsequent packets into the same REP file. In other words, if you had a week's worth of packets (as I ended up having), and rifled through ALL of them without uploading replies, only the replies from the first packet would be logged. I fixed another bug after that having to do with source messages, but this wasn't relevant until the other bug was tackled. o Killing replies with multiple parts: fixed the bug that killed the WRONG messages. Big bug (sorry), but it works now. o Fixed some problems and made some enhancements to the Fidonet node detection logic (replacing @FIDONET@ with the source message's fidonet address). Three digit zones are now supported where two digits was the previous max (800:676/23). There was a problem with "@" symbols as part of the Origin line text - fixed. I also now attempt to extract the Fidonet address from a source message format that I had never seen before. This format came from a source on the NITELOG BBS, one which is home to many MR/2 users. I now look for and use the "Reply:" line when found in a source netmail message. o When using U to UNMARK a message (to unkill a reply, for example), the INDEX markings would not be removed. Fixed. o Reports of sporadic crashing: some users have emailed me with crash-reports and supplied debugging addresses. Often these point me right to a problem. I have a couple of addresses that are in general routines, and the information supplied is not helping. I haven't forgotten you! I'm looking for these and trying to come up with another way to find these. I am also changing the way I archive older version so as not to "lose" the chance of making sense out of info from these older version. Changes included in v2.02 ------------------------- o Modified the after-packet-selection processing so that a local INI might be loaded *before* the unzipper is called. I've always held that MR/2 can't know the true BBS name until the packet is unzipped and the control.dat file is parsed. What happens now is, as soon as a packet is selected, a "base name" is derived from the packet name. For example, "e:\dl\pc-ohio.qwk;12" would be whittled down to "pc-ohio". If an INI file is found with this base name, it is instantly loaded. Again, this is *before* the packet is opened, so that BBS-specific unzippers can be identified. If an INI cannot be found matching this derived name, then MR/2 tries again, the old-fashioned normal way, after the packet has been opened. If one is found on the first try, no secondary loading is performed. This *should* work in most cases, particularly when OS/2 comm packages are used. NOTE that this is *still* too late to identify a different "working" directory. MR/2 has already changed the default path by this time. o Mouse hot spots on message viewing screen changed a little. I made clicking on the word "Subject:" equal to pressing the "Q" key and anywhere after the ":" and up to the "Conf:" word is still the same as pressing "H". This adds easier access to the Q key. Previously, the entire area was mapped to the "H" key. While I was at it, I added three more hotspots. The only correlation between word and feature is that the word starts with the same letter as the feature. That's how I picked the area :). Click on the "Ref#" area to "R" Reply. Click on the "Date" area to "D" defer. Click on the "Status" area to "S" Save. o That pesky lockup that occured when marking and deleting a block up to and including the EOF marker has been squashed. I could easily recreate it here, now it seems to be handled. I simply make sure that the end mark can't be placed on or after the EOF triangle. o Bug: With PositionOnMatch set to NO, the key-word highlight would also be suppressed for virtual conferences. Now the keywords hilite regardless of the setting of this switch. o By request ... remapped the numeric keyboard "5" key, when not in numeric mode (arrows are active) to be equivelent to the ESCAPE key. As was pointed on, one can now do most message selection and reading/movement functions from just the numeric pad. Changes included in v2.01 ------------------------- o Trying to open the WELCOME.QWK packet in the home MR/2 directory caused a trap and terminated the program. This was caused because of an error in the code that checks for the "\" character in the packet file name. If one wasn't there, it would crash. Fixed. o If a bad "working directory" was set in an icon, MR/2's background searching virtual conference builder would crash. I've fixed this, although some questions remain. Changes included in v1.99cx thru v2.00 -------------------------------------- Well, this is the long awaited v2.0 release! As usual, I wish I would have had *just another week*, but I'm already 10 weeks late from my original Jan 1 target. I'm sure there will be some quick updates as this hits the streets and some more bugs shake out. I've got to at least get to v2.03 soon, so as that Steve fellow that still uses v1.03 in Fido's OS/2 conferences will finally upgrade :) Lots of exciting things still to come. I just added CLONING as an experiment, and there's lots of potential here. Multiple sessions for different BBS's has been working ok; also has more potential. I'm personally in desperate need of a more complete folder setup. This means some type of database capability - entirely optional and user defined. I will be collecting ideas, requests and suggestions for subsequent versions. If I didn't get to something you want or need, feel free :) I *do* have every piece of correspondence ever sent to me, and I will pass through this yet again. o More work on the manual - 91 printed pages. Updated several sections and the corresponding table of contents entries. No index yet, but I plan on keeping this more up-to-date than it's been in the past. I also plan a more nicely formatted version for those that want more than just ASCII text. o Modified MR2INI.ORG extensively. This is the default INI file that is copied to MR2.INI the first time you bring up MR/2. Mostly a rearrange; I divided the file into sections: Basic setup, Reply/Quoting, Intermediate, Advanced and Misc. Some explanation at the front of the file, with notes to reference SEARCH.INI and EXAMPLE.TF where appropriate. Much cleaner. I hope this helps new users get going more smoothly. o Added more examples to SEARCH.INI, focusing on some of the newer and more power virtual conference features. o Added mr2icons.zip to the distribution zip (7k). Several misc. MR/2 and MR/2 PM icons provided compliments of long-time registered user John Bales. Thanks John! o Fixed a bug where, when killing certain replies, MR/2 would seem to hang, but then come back. There was an uninitialized counter under certain circumstances. This caused a loop to "do nothing" for some random amount of time until the counter ticked down. In the debugger session where I discovered this, the counter was set to 27,000+. It took about 2 minutes to come back. Fixed. o Spaces within an address-book "tag" field would keep the address from being selectable from the pick-list. Fixed. o WPS Associations referencing .REP files would fail, as would referencing a .REP file on the command line (same thing). This works now. o Fixed a problem where the reply packet would often be rezipped even though no changes were made to it. This happened when using no-packet entry and when selecting a .REP file directly from the packet selection screen. o Fidonet addresses that had two digit ZONES (e.g., 40:383/1) were not working properly. The zone was seen as only the last digit. Fixed for two digit zones - sorry, I didn't even know they existed :) o Address book: when selecting an address specified as private, either through the pick-list of by direct "!tag" identifier, the private flag would often remain public. Fixed. Changes included in v1.99bx --------------------------- o When using the /I or /W command line parameters (to open a second MR/2 session, for example), MR/2 would exit when the first packet was exited. Now it correctly returns to the packet select screen. o A user noticed that the highlighted item on the message index screen was a little difficult to read. In checking, I found that I used "light red" for foreground. Normal "red" is now used and the text appears slighlty sharper and easier to read. This effects most Blue selection boxes and confirmation prompts. o I *really* didn't want to do this so close to a scheduled major release. In fact, I don't know if I'll even try to finish this for v2.0, as to get it just right may take some time and experimentation. Cloning a session. It works, but there are tons of "how should this be handled questions". Read the next two entries. o New command line switch - /Clone or just /C. This *assumes* that a packet is already open in your default (or overridden with /w) working directory. This mode simply "uses existing packet", sets "go to last read position" and opens MR/2. When the packet menu is exited, you exit the program without cleanup. This is for use with an already running MR/2, so as to allow reading of the same open packet in another session. o Added some preliminary function keys to the MR/2 message viewer. CTRL-F1 "clones" a windowed session. CTRL-F3 clones full screen. This opens a second copy of MR/2, using the existing packet. This allows for multiple windows or session reading independently. The cloned window will not cleanup files, will not have bookmarks recorded (they are currently lost when session is closed). I just cloned three additional sessions from one "main" session. That's 4 windows into the same packet. This is *too* neat. This will take more thinking, but it's already been useful to me, so I'll let this out for others to experiement with. Some problems for me to resolve (and that means others should feel free to influence me :). Is it too restrictive to only let replies be generated from the "master" session? Hmmm. I've having some brainstorms here. I'm going to sleep on this one. NOTE: I've already thought this out to a level that's way too complicated to finish for v2.0. I will complete this code after v2.0 is released, and I will take suggestions in the meantime. So, while this feature will be left for those who wish to explore it, it will remain undocumented and "unsupported" for v2.0. I just don't want to rush to fix bugs in this right now. ALSO NOTE: Each cloned window is a child of the session doing the cloning. If you close the parent, the clildren disappear, too. There are so many possibilties here, and so may possible problems :). o Fixed a minor problem with selection lists where, when paging down at the end of the list, the cursor would sometimes move up or down the list, but not land on the last entry. o Mouse cursor would sometimes leave a "black hole" on blue prompt boxes. In fact, mouse cursor was not visible for these boxes unless first moved. o Read.me file: removed pre v1.95 material. I will make all complete modification logs available on Nerd's Nook sometime after v2.0 is released. Changes included in v1.99Ax --------------------------- o Phantom "killed" status would sometimes show up in the corner of the messge viewer when reading inbasket/logged messages. The messages was often active, and the status report in error. I've fixed this. o More manual work. Checked for spelling mistakes and generated a preliminary table of contents. o Thesaurus - cleaned up all the fancy features. They didn't always work as advertised :( o Fixed a bug where, upon reentering an "existing", previously opened packet, the local INI file was not loaded before parts of the packet where reloaded. This caused things like conferences that were declared as hidden to be displayed. They would be hidden when the packet was open the first time, but ALT-X, go back in and they'd be listed. o Added S-Save and P-Print to Bulletins, Files and News viewers. Careful, as ANSI codes *are not* stripped before saving/printing. Help screen also updated. o I scrunched the message header form one more time, getting 3 more characters for taglines. That makes a max tag of 69 chars. When I get more energy I'll expand this again. I figure I can get 3-4 more, but I'd have to rework the whole form. Not something I care to do at this time. o Ouch! Big problem with ADD/DROP logic; whether using the default door name or a INI-declared name. Both Subject and To fields in the message header received C-type (zero terminated) strings instead of QWK formatted, fill-with-spaces strings. I'm sure this confused many a mail door and was probably the reason I received so many "not working" complaints. Heck, it confused my message index screen! Sorry :(. Thanks you to Marc Bourassa for getting me enough info to find this! Changes included in v1.99x -------------------------- o More manual work, of course. I'm up to 81 pages and still more to do. o Help screen touch-ups to reflect new keys added in the last release or two. o Added new reply-time replacable template variables: TargetTo, TargetToFirst and TargetToLast. These are the same as the "TO" series, except that TO is replaced by the original messages TO and is useful mostly for attribution lines. It was brought to my attention that accessing the target user's name was not available. It is now! Still thinking about Subject and others along those lines ... o Removed MR2.HST from the distribution zip list. I read it over and every feature it describes is now documented. o Added Hotkeys back to the Edit Message Header screen. F4 used to bring up the tagline picklist, and for awhile F6 brought up the Address pick list. I removed these keys and received some complaints. I've added alternate ways to get to the picklists on this screen: ALT-T to select taglines, ALT-C for conferences and ALT-A for addresses (these work from *any* field). o Added some options for accessing external utilities differently. This was partially in an attempt to solve some rare problems with either 4os2 or booting from the D:\ drive, or both. These may offer a performance boots in other cases. Since I just spelled this all out in a messages, I'll use that: For all of MR/2 classic's external utility access, I used the system(command) call. This is a C function that says "load the command processor and give it this command". This is all dependent on the comspec being set correctly, and on ZTC's runtime code (which did look ok, BTW). Still, BW/2 mentioned being able to run an editor and/or pkzip directly, w/o loading CMD.EXE. I thought for a second, and remembered that MR/2 PM does exactly this. So, I scarfed the Run() function out of my MR/2 PM code and made it optionally accessible. Now, mind you, this gets a little silly and is subject to one final change :). I still call external EXE's the same old way ... UNLESS you prefix it with a code or two. For example: Editor=q loads q.exe the same old way. Editor=!c:\qe3\q.exe loads a windowed Q.exe on the desktop, running q.exe directly (no cmd.exe involved). File must be fully qualified with full path specifications. Editor=!!c:\qe3\q.exe loads a full screen session w/o loading cmd.exe - q.exe loads directly. Fully qualify the file name. Editor=!$c:\qe3\dos\q.exe loads a DOS windowed session, loading Q.exe directly. CMD.exe is not accessed, but command.com is. May still cause D:\ booting problems, but it's an option. Editor=!$!c:\qe3\dos\q.exe Loads the DOS Qedit into a Full screen DOS session w/o accessing cmd.exe. NOTE that these work with the zipper/unzipper, too, as well as PreEdit, PostEdit, F2-F10, etc.,. Anytime an external util is called, I check for these prefixes for special processing. I should have done this a long time ago :) Since CMD.exe is removed from the loop with these commands, the programs should load more quickly. In fact, they seem to, but it's very hard to measure. o Problem with BackDropMaxLines. If this maximum line count was GREATER than the actual lines in the file, MR/2 would end up searching/displaying *past* the end of the buffer. This caused garbage to the screen at best, crashing in most cases. The GCO ANSI Goodbye screen was only 20 lines long, and with the max lines set at 24, horrible things would happen. Fixed. Changes included in v1.98x -------------------------- o Manual work. It's growing fast. Enclosed is a new "preliminary" MR2.DOC file. The old manual was 22 pages, this one is 70 or so and there's still plenty to add. Some sections are incomplete. No, I haven't checked for spelling errors. I'm open for comments, but don't dig too deeply, please. o PurgeAfterDays and PurgeAfterCount now actually function. Here's how it works: When you close a packet, MR/2 has always "packed" your InBasket, if any. This process simply involved passing through the InBasket and removing "killed" message by writing over them with active ones. When the ReplyLog was added, the same process was performed. Since the reply log grows with each reply, I added code to control the number of messages kept, by maximum age or by maximum count, or by both. If PurgeAfterDays is not specified (or set to zero), no age check is performed on replylog messages. Otherwise ... The Reply log is first packed the old way with a slight additional check. If a message is found to be active and older that the cut-off date (older that PurgeAfterDays old), then the message is marked as killed. The normal removal process follows after this check. If a message is killed and it has a "source" or "original" message after it (these have special MR/2-internal markings), this is also killed. Once this pass has been completed, all manually killed and "old" message have been removed, along with any "source" messages recorded with them. A count of active messages is returned to the packing process. If PuregAfterCount is not specified, or set to zero, no maximum message checking is performed. Otherwise ... Now, MR/2 compares the active message count to the specified maximum (PurgeAfterCount). If found to be greater, then the number of messages to delete is calculated. A new pass is made through the folder, and the oldest messages are marked and deleted until the number of messages to delete has been reached. Again, if a message is removed, so is its source/original message, if one exists. I will add a way to mark a reply as "permanent". This will keep the packing routines from removing it. A permanent message will not be deleted until you manually kill it. As an additional feature, I want to add an "unkill" key. I've killed a couple of replylog messages that I didn't want to, and saving them was a real pain. And I even know how! I wouldn't expect anyone else to be able to figure this out. o Double confirmation prompt on exiting the editor w/out saving. I lost my last long-winded reply to this gotcha. If you would press ESCAPE too many times, too fast, while in the internal editor, you would often end up losing any/all changes. This was because ESCAPE is seen as a request to exit the editor, and the "would you like to save" question, when ESCAPE is pressed, says "No". Two escapes and you've lost any changes. I've done this more than once by accident. It angered me; I apologize for causing anyone else this frustration. Now, if you escape out of the editor and changes have been made, it asks you if you wish to save them. If you press ESCAPE, it askes if you're sure, and ESCAPE says "no, I'm not sure" and saves your work. You must press YES or press ENTER to abort changes. o Cutting from a DOS windowed session and pasting to MR/2, using ALT-* fails. Previous versions would actually crash, leaving the clipboard open and locking up any program that tried to access it afterwards. I'm still trying to find out why this fails, but in the meantime, I removed the crashing, and the subsequent lockups. o Packing the folders (Inbasket, ReplyLog). A informative popup window now is displayed while this process performs it's work. o Added a "Make Permanent" key for use within the Reply Log. Pressing "!" will mark the Reply Log message as a "keeper" and the Folder packing routine will no automatically delete this message, nomatter how old it is or how many messages over the maximum exist. o Added an "UnKill" keystroke. Pressing "U" will remove the "Killed" marking from any message. o New INI parameter - BackdropMaxLines. This controls the maximum number of lines from the WELCOME and GOODBYE screens will be flashed to the screen. Some BBS's have ANSI Welcome screens that are multiple pages long. MR/2 would proceed to flash these messages completely at various times. Set BackdropMaxLines to 25, for example, to flash only the first screen. Setting this parameter to zero will suppress the Welcome screen altogether. The default is set to -1, which will flash any and all lines of the file to the screen. o I think I fixed the problem with crashing when trying to finish out of MR/2 *before* the background searching was finished. This would not happen if all virtual conferences had been created but, if you would open a packet by mistake and try to quickly get out of it, crash! This was because I was deleting all the work files before the background process was told to stop ... and it was trying to read messages.dat. o New INI parameters: F2 through F10. Used to attach command-line actions to function keys. Changes included in v1.97x -------------------------- o I forgot to list the INI options SavePointerFiles, PurgeAfterDays and PurgeAfterCount in the MR2INI.ORG file. These are now listed. More INI's, as I try to clean up some smaller user problems and requests: o "DoorName" may now be used to identify the target BBS door "user name" to which to address ADD/DROP messages. This not only aids in the case where a BBS door provides no DOOR.ID file, but also when trying to perform ADD/DROP functions from no-packet entry or reply packet maintenance. For example, DoorName=RoseMail will address all ADD/DROP messages TO: RoseMail. o "CursorSize" may now be specified for the normal internal editor cursor. Many users complained that, in certain video modes (large number of lines/screen), and under some setups, the cursor could not be seen. By default, MR/2's normal editor cursor is 1 scanline high (maybe two?). When lines/screen is 34 or more, MR/2 changes the cursor to 6 or 7 scanlines. This was reported to still not be visable sometimes. So, You may now specify the number of scanlines for a normal cursor - from 1 to 13. MR/2's "overtype" cursor is 13 (14?) scanlines tall and is not configurable at this time. Example: CursorSize = 10 o I did manage to finalize the thesaurus data file. The "officially released" thesaurus wordbase will consist of 9242 "key" words with a total of 70,101 synonyms. The technique I'm using makes it easy to find synonyms, even if the word is not found to be a key. o There was a problem with using a MessageOrder of anything BUT subject. A variable remained uninitialized in all cases except by subject, and this caused crashing as soon as a conference was selected and the message index sort was started. Fixed. o Selection lists had a bug that wouldn't allow you to select the LAST entry (if the "page" was full). Clicking on the bottom line of the box did nothing (it's supposed to page down), and clicking on the slot for the last entry on the page paged-down. Fixed. o INI file now includes a default virtual conference. This will help new users "discover" this key feature much quicker. o Manual has actually been worked on! No, it's not in here. It's not in *that* great a shape yet, but it's progressing :) Changes included in v1.96x -------------------------- Still lots left to do, I'll try to get a summary list together and post it next time. I'm getting close, tho. Bug reports seem to be light, which makes me happy. I wanted to hit Feb 1st, but I'm not sure now. If I can get a couple of good days in I can call it soup. It will be *very* soon, the manual being the last major "feature" to address. o New and Improved help screens. Added definitions for dozens of previously-unlisted keystrokes and functions. HELPS include 20 or so completely *new* screens, too, covering many of the newer enhancements. NOTE that mr2.hlp is a simple editor file with [TAG] markers to tell me where a help section starts. The section ends at the next tag marker. If you don't like my HELP text, you *can* create your own text (modify my descriptions). A section must fit on the screen, tho, with a char/line or two reserved as border. Hey, if you end up with something you think is better, send it to me and if I agree, I'll use it :) I start on the manual next - actually already have, but now I have to be serious! o Updated MR2INI.ORG with a section that describes the newest INI variables. o Tab expansion in the message viewer. I default this to 4 characters, but allow you to toggle this value via ALT-TAB. Sequence is 4,8,0,2 where "0" means show the tab character and don't expand. o I discovered that searching while in the INBASKET or the REPLYLOG didn't work. Searching within an INBASKET has never worked. Fixed this (modified QWK.Getfh()). o By request (several), the spacebar may now be used as an alternate to ENTER for selecting a conference w/mail to read. This was a tough call, as the ' ' is a valid typing character, and I can see some folks trying to do a conference name prefix jump to the "main board" conference by typing "Main ". Where this would previously work, and it still *might*, the spacebar press will cause the highlighted conference to now be selected. Open for comments, I think this will be OK, tho. o It was pointed out to me that many keyboards don't have an F11 key, and that's what I chose as the "mark" key on selection list. (At this time, "marking" within a list only has a purpose on the packet selection screen, for merging QWK packets.) After some thinking and experimentation, I made the "*" key a synonym for F11 on pick lists. It was suggested to use + and - to mark, unmark, but the minus or dash often comes up as part of conference and packet names. So, "jump to prefix" would be affected. The "*" key will toggle the mark on and off. This key is easily selected w/o shifting by using the one on the numeric keypad (eeek! Assuming you have one :). o UNQWK.CMD bug - my first user "fix" to this routine! Thank you Wolfgang von Thuelen for pointing this out. In the check for long file names, I ignored the case where file names were exactly 12 characters long BUT were still non-FAT names (e.g., "mwcst.qwk;11"). The first 'if' statement was changed from "if flongnames < 0" to "if flongnames <= 0". o More thesaurus work - mostly minor cosmetics. I've almost got what I want, although I know the ALT-S and ALT-L are buugy now. I'm letting it out with these bugs, as it's still functional and I doubt many are using this feature (yet?). Keys you may press with descriptions are placed above editor window. Changes included in v1.95x -------------------------- I'm calling this v1.95x, as I consider myself "close" to what I wanted in a v2.0 release. I do have a few features to add; although not many. Believe me, I've got plenty of ideas for v2.01 and beyond. Existing users know that this has never been a static product :). I've created quite a few monsters here ... huge new features that are going to take some "shaking out" to get them working perfectly. o Clipboard: When doing an "append" (ALT-GREY-= or ALT-GREYENTER) to an empty clipboard, MR/2 would crash. The first text copied to the clipboard had to be done with the ALT-+ command, then appending would work. Fixed. You can now append to an empty clipboard. o Reply log messages can now be "Copied" and/or "Replied to". The message is then copied into the reply conference as to be "sent again". o INI parsing problem prevented FolderPath from being recognized. (Discovered when relinking and testing MR/2 PM). o Mouse could not be used to select the very first entry in a selection list. This was broken recently - now fixed. o Template Sections labeled as "New" using routing lines: I had previously noted in this document AND personally corresponded electronically with a few of you about this. Specifically, *before* this version, the $Body line was needed *before* the routing line, as for "new" messages, only the "signature" sections was placed in the reply file. THIS HAS ALL BEEN CHANGED. The 'New' Sections now work the way you would expect; the entire section is placed in the reply file, and the $Body (while still necessary) should be placed where you would normally start your reply. In other words, these sections should be setup the way you would expect from using the "normal" sections as an example. o Packet selection screen: You may now MARK two or more packets on this screen and actually MERGE them together as one QWK packet. Use F11 to mark the packets to combine, then ALT-M (Merge) to merge them together. This process calls upon my new and improved MQWK.CMD REXX command file to do most of the work. This makes the process configurable/extendable, as long as you want to tinker with REXX source code. Multiple/automatic archiver detection is not supported at this time; the archiver name is hard-coded in the script to be "pkunzip -n" and the zipper is 'pkzip'. Modify these in MQWK.CMD if necessary. When you press ALT-M, and if 2 or more packets are marked, MR/2 will prompt for a target packet name. If a name is supplied, all marked QWK packets will be merged into one with this name. If no name is supplied, MR/2 simply combines the packets in the TMP$$ work directory, where they can be read as a combined packet. NOTE, however, that bookmarks will be lost, as there will be no "target" packet to record them to. I suggest always allowing MR/2 to repack the combined QWK packet. FURTHER NOTE: I've now modified the script so that there is very little reason *not* to repack the combined messages into a new QWK file. If a name is supplied as a target, MR/2 combines all marked packets and jumps right into "read" mode. AT THE SAME TIME, I spawn another session, in the background, to archive the combined packet. This becomes invisible to you and should not impede your normal reading operations. If the combined packet does not show up on the packet selection screen, you may reference MQWK.LOG for possible error messages. All output from the archiving process is redirected to this file. Index files (*.ndx) are discarded by the merge process ... MR/2 will create index files when it opens the combined packet. I've tested this procedure with QMail and CamMail doors. I expect that other doors may created cases that call for a little adjusting. Keep me posted. ALSO, no error checking is performed to assure that all the packets you are merging together are of the same BBS. THIS IS IMPORTANT, as merging dissimilar packets WILL NOT WORK CORRECTLY. ALSO NOTE that this takes alot of free disk space. A set of QWK packets totaling 2MB might require 4-5 MB additional free disk space to function. o INTERNAL: Messages.dat is now opened in READ-ONLY mode. This allows the file to be accessed in a background task for archiving. o INTERNAL: Modifications to zDList, zDLSelect and zDirSelect (linked list and selection from list(s) routines) to further support "marking" of members and retrieval of "marked" status in various forms. o I received a packet via CIS email from the Channel1 BBS. This board has been a great logic-breaker for me ... they ought to quit growing! Anyway, their control.dat files finally made it over 64k, which has always been an MR/2 limitation (due to an initial design flaw on my part). This is now fixed so that there is *no* maximum control.dat file size limitation. I now handle/parse this file one line at a time w/o loading it all into memory up front. Channel1 packets once again work! o HideConferences can now be specified multiple times within a set of INI files. The hidden conferences list is now cumulative where before only the last HideConference line was effective. o I expanded the packet selection screen even more and added columns for Per (Personal) and Rep (Replied-to) message counts. I know that I'm constantly trying to remember which packet had all the personals to me in it, so this helps me out. The reply count may also help tell you something about a particular packet. o Modified ZTC's library routine system(). Command line was deemed invalid when > 128 characters. OS/2 allows much more; I changed the max to 256. This will allow more QWK packets to be merged together (it broke today at 4 fully qualified packet names). o Changes to the way the built-in thesaurus functions. I've still got some fancy things to do, but it's getting closer. Invoking the thesaurus for a word that was not a "key" in the word base previously did nothing; it just ignored you. Now, MR/2 posts a message and jumps into a sequential "match" search. When you request a further search of the database using ALT-S, a similar message is posted. Both messages mention that you can now press ESCAPE to hault the search. Also, when a search completes with out finding any new words, MR/2 keeps the previous word list on the screen. Before, you would be placed out of the thesaurus. KNOWN BUGS AND STUFF ==================== The TEMPORARY directory MUST remain a subdirectory of the MR2 home dir. You can't use "\" or "&" as part of any search text (since MR/2 uses them as delimiters). You can't cancel a search until the first "hit" is displayed. This is particularly irritating when soundex searching, since soundexing is noticably slower. If you set "SkipReadMessages" to true, you cannot gain access to a conferences where all messages have previously been read. Other frills that have not yet been addressed: Bulk marking, twit filter. There are probably others. Feel free to bombard me with requests.