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Text File | 1991-06-27 | 12.9 KB | 249 lines

GrabText, Version 1.10, May 1991 A Mouse Cut-And-Paste Utility for IBM-PC's and compatibles Copyright (C) 1991 Scott Drellishak All Rights Reserved From perusing other programs' documentation, I gather that I should say that IBM and IBM-PC are registered trademarks of International Business Machines, Inc. If I've missed any other trademarks, I hope that whoever owns them forgives me. Description GrabText is a TSR program which allows you to grab text from the screen and then send it as if you had typed the characters from the keyboard. It was inspired by the cut-and-paste abilities of the xterm terminal emulator (which is part of the X Window System, which is probably a registered trademark of either MIT or DEC). This program is the answer to a long- standing question for most PC users with mice: "What good is my mouse when many programs don't support one?" GrabText is free, and freely distributable. However, if you use the program a lot and like it, please consider sending a donation to the address below (read the section "Begging and Stuff"). The "GrabText.com" program, when run, loads itself into memory, and you're all set. It uses about 6k of memory, plus the size of the cut buffer (this would be less if I had written it in assembly language rather than C. Maybe in a future version). It has five command-line options: GrabText [-b <size>] [-p <size] [-nocheck] [-safe] [-off] "GrabText -b <size>", where size is an integer, sets the size of the cut buffer (the memory where the text you cut from the screen). The default buffer size is 2000 bytes, which is enough to hold a full screen of 80 x 25 characters. "GrabText -p <size>", where size is an integer, sets the number of characters to be pushed onto the keyboard buffer during each clock tick (1/18 of a second). The default push block size is 8. You may want to use a lower value if a program you use is dropping characters pushed by GrabText. Note that using a value of blocksize larger than the size of your keyboard buffer (which is 16, unless you use some neat program to change it) will _always_ cause characters to be dropped. Try it and see what I mean. "GrabText -nocheck" tells GrabText not to check and see if it is already installed in memory. Normally, GrabText puts a "magic cookie" value in the ICA when it starts up. If you then try to install GrabText in memory again, it notices that it has already been installed once, and refuses. This method isn't perfect (if another program uses the ICA area in memory, the cookie may get clobbered), but it seems to work pretty well. "GrabText -safe" turns off the text-mode mouse cursor during highlighting. This assures that reverse-video junk is not left on the screen when the user moves the mouse while selecting a region of text, a probelm which occurs on slower machines. If you see this mess on your screen when using GrabText with no command-line options, use the -safe option. "GrabText -off" starts up GrabText with the mouse cursor off, rather than on. This is useful if your autoexec.bat startup file prints out enough stuff to make the screen scroll (see below for a note about the mouse cursor and scrolling). GrabText will only work in text modes. When the computer enters a graphics mode, GrabText will not operate. This is necessary because (a) I didn't want GrabText to interfere with programs which actually use the mouse, many of which run in graphics modes, and (b) there's no way to grab text off the screen when the text is in fact a bunch of pixels. Pattern matching fonts is a little beyond the scope of a TSR. Use After GrabText is running, the mouse buttons perform the following functions: Left Button: Select text Right Button: Paste text into the keyboard buffer Middle Button: Toggle cursor on an off For those of you without a middle button, what were you thinking when you bought your mouse? In any case, you can toggle the cursor on and off by pressing the left and right buttons simultaneously. Note that if the cursor is off and you press the left button to select some text, the cursor automatically comes back on. To select text, position the mouse cursor at one end of the text you want to highlight, press the left button, and drag the cursor until the section of text you wish to select is highlighted. When you release the left button, the selected text will flash several times, and the highlighting will disappear. If you wish to select a single word (made up of alphanumeric characters), double-click on the word with the left button. Now, you can paste the selected text into the keyboard buffer, just as if you had typed the text in from the keyboard, by pressing the right button. Note that you can paste the selected text any number of times, until you select another block with the left button. For those of you who worry, yes, you can select a block of text bigger than the keyboard buffer without overflowing, as long as the program running is reading keystrokes. For instance, if you're in the terminal mode of your favorite communications program, you can select a big block of text and send the whole thing at once, since GrabText only sends a few characters of the selected text every clock tick (an 18th of a second, if I recall). All but the most cheesily written programs should read characters faster than this, so, no overflow. And there you have it. Revision History version New features, bugs fixed ----------------------------------------------------------------- [0.0, 1.0) Didn't work right. 1.0 Worked (not quite so) fabulously well 1.01 Fixed problems with MicroSoft mice 1.10 Added buffer size and push block size command line options, as well as the check for previous installation and -nocheck command line option. Interesting Stuff, and Caveats Rather than have the usual "answers to frequently asked (but really simple minded) questions" list here, I'll give you a quickie overview of how GrabText works, so you can answer the questions yourself. GrabText reads characters directly from the frame buffer of the screen. This means that you get exactly what you see on the screen. Among other things, this means you can't have GrabText send function key combinations (unless you get really clever, and put NULs into the frame buffer directly, or some- thing). If you try to pick up more that one line of text, you also get all the spaces on the beginning and end of the lines, and there is no newline put in if you wrap around the edge of the screen. Perhaps in a future version I'll fix it so that it stops at the end of each line and inserts a newline, like xterm does. GrabText inserts characters directly into the keyboard buffer currently in use by the BIOS, which is pointed to by two pointers in low memory whose exact addresses escape me. Look it up in that book with that "Hey, my arms are folded" guy on the cover. Since it only pastes a fwe characters per clock tick, you can hold down a key and paste a chunk of text, and have the keyboard characters in between the pasted text. I consider this a big feature, and so should you. Since the mouse cursor in text modes is created by reverse- videoing a character cell, the highlighting can interfere with the cursor in cases where you move the cursor faster than the highlight updates (this is pretty fast, even on a slow machine). But, if you time it just right, you can make the cursor leave highlight-garbage on the screen. If you use the -safe option, this problem goes away, but be aware that the cursor is no longer visible when you select text, so the size of the highlighted area will be one character cell different when the -safe option is used. This isn't too much of a problem if you either use or don't use -safe consistently, but it can be dis- concerting if you switch it on and off. It turns out that if the screen scrolls while the mouse cursor is visible, the visible cursor gets moved up one line, and this never gets erased (try it yourself to see what I mean). I could find no solution to this problem, except to catch the BIOS screen scrolling call, and turn the mouse cursor off during a scroll. Unfortunately, scrolling is one of the things handled by screen device drivers like ANSI.SYS, so this solution only works when no such device driver is loaded. If anyone has a solution to this problem (specifically, how can I know when the screen is scrolling regardless of whether it's due to a BIOS call, or a device driver?), you can contact me at either of the addresses below. Help is greatly appreciated. Begging and Stuff I originally wrote this program to pass the time and learn how to do TSRs in C, but I liked it so much that I debugged it and made it not crash (which is no small task when you can't even send a printf message to the screen for debugging). I'm releasing this as "begware". That is, I worked quite a bit on this program, and if you like it, I'd appreciate it if you'd send cash or check (made out to Scott Drellishak) to: GrabText 827 Santa Anita Ave. San Marino, CA 91108 Internet mail: sfd@cory.berkeley.edu I suggest 10 dollars, but it's up to you. You are under no obligation to do so -- the donation is purely voluntary. I put that "Copyright...All Rights Reserved" at the top because it seemed like a good idea, but you are free to distribute this by any means you like, as long as you (a) include this documentation file with the program when you distribute it, (b) do not, in any way, alter this file or the GrabText program (GRABTEXT.COM), and (c) do not charge more than the cost of packaging the program, if you are distributing it on disk or other media. I'd really appreciate it if you'd spread this program around, either on bulletin boards, networks, or by sneakernet. This is the first released version of GrabText, so expect bugs. The likelihood of there being more versions without those bugs, and more features, depends on the generosity of users like you (hint, hint). If no one expresses an interest, I probably won't spend the time (unless I get really bored). Finally, please be aware that GrabText has NOT been tested extensively, because I don't have the machines or the software to test all sorts of odd permutations and combinations. If you use the program, you run the risk of it, say, getting confused by the network driver you have running, and erasing the contents of your harddisk at an innopportune time. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED BY THIS PROGRAM. Be especially careful when using other TSR programs that use the timer interrupt, other programs that play games with the keyboard buffer, and other programs that use the mouse. You should also be aware that there are bad people out there who will ignore part (b) above and put a virus into this program -- if you don't check the program for viruses, logic bombs, trojan horses, etc. before you run it, don't blame me if there is one. Basically, run this program at your own risk. GOOD LUCK! GOOD GRABBING! SEND MONEY!