WINDOW Submitted by: Richard A. Eesley RCA-MSR MS 108-237 Borton Landing Road Moorestown, NJ 08057 (609) 778-3627 This software is made available to the public with no warranties, guarantees, or liability for its use and consequences thereof. This software only works under VAX/VMS 4.0 or greater This software program allows the user to simulate having WINDOWs such as the Apollo or MacIntosh computers. Each WINDOW is attached to a seperate process ( which the program spawns ) and different commands may be running in each WINDOW. Whether or not this is really useful is debateable, but it makes a great show and it was a fun way to learn the Screen Management system calls that came with VMS 4.0. The program ocasionally crashes leaving behind possible spawned processes, so beware of them. This program was an experiment and as one, it does still have a few bugs. None are catastrophic, but some are annoying. Occassionally the program just stops and logs the user off for no apparent reason. I have not been able to figure out why yet. You can use edt in window, but not inside a window. Instead you can type $ WINDOW EDIT FILENAME.EXT on the command line and the edit will be run over the windows. All output to the windows is batched until the editing is done, then it is all sent to the screen. Just a few notes on the implementation: The command line editing could not be used because its use blocks the output of characters to the screen. When you run this program you will notice that output is written to all the active screens in order, and even as the user is typing input into the prompt WINDOW. This couldn't be done if I kept the command line editing. Maybe some ambitious person will write in a command editing feature to this doggie. As it stands, all input to WINDOW is through single character QIO's. I wrestled with several semi clever attempts to use buffering, but always ran into the problem of VMS buffering terminal output until terminal input is finished. Too bad! COMMANDS Following is a list of commands which the program will allow you to use. The ^ is to represent control characters, so ^c is control C. Following is a list of commands which can be executed in the WINDOW Page 2 program. ^H or WINDOW help. The user may enter a control H, or type the command WINDOW help in the prompt WINDOW and the help menu will be displayed on the screen. Any further characters typed into the prompt WINDOW will erase the help WINDOW. ^E or WINDOW exit This gets the user out of the WINDOW program and kills all the processes that WINDOW spawned. This is graceful exit. If stuck you can always type ^Y, I decided not to block it as an escape hatch. ^R or WINDOW reverse Changes the current to the previous WINDOW. The prompt WINDOW is always associated with one WINDOW which is the current WINDOW. The title on this WINDOW is highlighted. When the program starts this will be WINDOW 1. If you do WINDOW reverse while on the lowest WINDOW the current WINDOW will become the highest numbered WINDOW ( like wrap around I suppose) ^F or WINDOW forward Go forward one WINDOW. The opposite of WINDOW reverse. ^N or WINDOW new Creates another WINDOW. This can be done up to 10 times, try it! ^P or WINDOW position Positions the WINDOW. Use the I,J,K, and M keys to move the WINDOW up, left, right, and down respectively. This is my favorite command. Any other key than the I,J,K, or M gets you out of WINDOW position mode. ^V or WINDOW view The changes the size of the WINDOW. It moves the lower right coordinate relative to the upper left. Use I,J,K, and M keys as in WINDOW positioning. Any other key exits the position mode. ^W or WINDOW clear Clears the current WINDOW, nothing special... ^D or WINDOW delete Page 3 Deletes the highest number WINDOW. If current WINDOW is to be deleted then current WINDOW becomes the new highest numbered WINDOW. ^U As in regular DCL, delete current line in prompt WINDOW. ^BC or ^BW A control B followed by either a W or a C toggles on and off the different modes of command input. For example, ^BC stops WINDOW from interpreting control characters as commands. Another ^BC will allow WINDOW to intrepret control characters. This feature allows you to stop WINDOW from interpreting control characters for applications programs which require them. WINDOW file This command writes out the current screen to a file called WINDOW.dat. This is semi-useless, but you can print the things out and show your Apollo computer friends that, YES, THE VAX CAN CERTAINLY DO WINDOWS! WINDOW pop n This pops the nth WINDOW to the top of the screen. Oh boy! Page 4 Here is a summary of the WINDOW commands... H E L P M E N U ^h window help - Gets this baby... ^e window exit - Gets you out of program ^r window reverse - Go back one window ^f window forward - Go forward one window ^n window new - Create a new window ^p window position - Move upper left x,y coordinate ^v window view - Change the window view size ^w window clear - Clear current window ^d window delete - Delete highest numbered window ^u - Delete to beginning of command line ^b - Toggle, must follow with a 'c' or 'w' turns on/off cntl chars or window comm's window file - Write screen to a file named window.dat window pop n - nth window to the top edt filename.ext - Runs edt using callable edt...