ConfigEditor ============ PURPOSE Global configuration editor for ScreenEdit 2.0. Use this to set up ScreenEdit's default behavior. Users can further modify this with EditOpts. USE ScreenEdit works well "out of the box", but you may want to customize various aspects of the program. You can use the ConfigEditor Gadtools-based configuration program. This will let you select colors, language text, quote headers, and many more options. FILE READ ACCESS This defines the minimum access level for the ^X^I insert-file command. Any file on your system can be read using this command, so it should be available only to you and possibly your co-sysops. FILE WRITE ACCESS This defines the minimum access level for the ^X^W write-file command. Any file on your system can be written using this command, so it should be available only to you and possibly your co-sysops. TAB WIDTH When the user presses the TAB key, ScreenEdit inserts spaces until the next tab position is reached. By default, the tab stops are set to every 8 positions. FORTUNE COOKIE COMMAND A fortune cookie is a random comment, phrase, or joke that can be inserted at the end of your message. If enabled, the fortune cookie will appear after your message text but before your signature (if any). ScreenEdit allows up to twenty different fortune cookie commands to be configured. This lets your users choose different themes depending on the message area they're using, or on their mood. For example, you could setup fortunes for Star Trek, Movie Trivia, Famous Quotes, or whatever. Click the "New" gadget to create a new fortune cookie command. Enter the command and a brief description of the command. The description is what the users see when they choose from multiple fortune commands, so say something like Star Trek quotes" as your description. Click the "Delete" gadget to delete the currently displayed fortune cookie command, and click on "Next" to step through all of the commands you have defined. To use fortune cookies, you must find a suitable fortune cookie command and tell ScreenEdit how to run it. The basic requirement is that it must write its message to standard output with no ANSI codes. You should keep fortunes limited to one or two lines to avoid the wrath of other sysops. - Mark Montminy's CRUMBS program is highly recommended. It includes options to limit the chosen cookie to a certain number of lines, and to provide leading and trailing delimiters if you wish. CRUMBS is available from most BBS's that offer DLG support files. LI Here's a reasonable setup for CRUMBS that limits fortunes to two lines, and puts three dots in front of the fortune to make it stand out: dlg:utils/crumbs -l 2 -p ... - A special version of ASTG has been released to work with ScreenEdit and DLG. Since it was written by DLG's author, be assured it will work :-) - Several databases of fortunes are floating around the online community, included the typical cookies, Star Trek phrases, and obscene fortunes. You may also choose to create a database of your own fortunes, so that your messages have a more individualized appearance. Look around various BBS's to find fortune cookie files. If you are on FidoNet, you might also investigate the TAGLINES echo. Enter the fortune cookie command in the appropriate gadget in ConfigEditor. Do not use any file redirection. Do not use "run" to execute the command. The command should be found in your CLI PATH, or you may specify the full path of the command. The fortune cookie command line may contain any of the normal DLG %variables. These will be expanded and passed to the fortune program, which may then do further processing. This might be used by a combination fortune/signature program to include the user's name in the generated fortune. Note that this capability is meaningless if your fortune cookie program does not use it. By default, the fortune cookie will NOT be added to messages. To get a cookie you must use the ESC-Z (user customization) command from within EmacsDLG. Any user who wants to use the fortune cookies must do this. They will then have a choice of three fortune cookie options: - Never append a cookie to messages. This is the default. - Ask if a cookie should be used when the message is saved. In this mode, the chosen cookie will appear in the lower ScreenEdit window and you can choose whether or not to use it. If you don't like it, more cookies will be chosen until you find one you like, or you give up. - Always append a cookie to messages. In this mode, ScreenEdit will choose a cookie and append it without letting you preview the cookie. This only works if you have defined exactly one fortune cookie command. If you define more than one, EmacsDLG will always ask. The user also gets to decide which of the fortune cookie topics is to be used as their default. They can specify one to use, or they can have ScreenEdit ask them each time they save a message. Remember, to get a fortune cookie you must configure it in the user customization command. FILE REQUESTER DIRECTORY The ^X^I insert-file and ^X^W write-file commands use a file requester. You may specify the directory path to be displayed the first time the file requester is used. The default is RAM:. BROADCAST PORTS The ESC ! command can be used to send a broadcast message to another port. This is useful if you get a broadcast message from another user, and you want to respond without leaving the editor. When ESC ! is invoked, ScreenEdit shows a listing of who is on-line, so that you can direct your broadcast to the correct port. By default, the port listing will show TR0, TR1, and TL0. Specify the ports you want displayed in the BROADCAST PORTS gadget. Type all your ports together as one string with no blanks. For example, "TR0TR1TR2TR3TR4". SPELLING CHECKER RUN COMMAND ScreenEdit uses an external AREXX spelling checker. If you wish it to start the spelling checker program when a user first invokes it, specify that command here. Note that you will most likely want to use "RUN >NIL: command" so that the spelling checker is run in the background. The redirection to NIL: is necessary to prevent AmigaDOS from writing the "[CLI n]" message to the user's screen. You may instead prefer to start the spelling checker in your user-startup and leave it running all the time. If you wish to do this, enter a ";" semi-colon as the spelling checker run command. See the SPELLING CHECKER section later in this manual for details on how to configure specific spelling checkers. The default setup will work with Ispell. SPELLING CHECKER AREXX PORT Enter the name of the AREXX port used by your spelling checker. The default setup will work with Ispell. SPELLING CHECKER CHECK COMMAND Enter the AREXX command used by your spelling checker to check a word. The spelling checker must respond in one of the following ways: - It should send a result code of 1, with a secondary result of "ok" or "bad" depending on whether or not the word is spelled correctly. - It should send a result code of 1 if the word is spelled correctly, or a result code of 0 if the word is spelled incorrectly. SPELLING CHECKER EXIT COMMAND Enter the AREXX command that will cause your spelling checker program to exit. ScreenEdit will send this command when the user exits from ScreenEdit. The default setup works with Ispell. You may prefer to leave your spelling checker running at all times. If you wish to do this, enter a ";" semi-colon as the spelling checker exit command. CUSTOM TEXT Many of the text messages displayed by ScreenEdit can be customized. The scrolling list contains a short description of each text that can be changed. Click on the desired description to cause the current value to be displayed in the large gadget below the list. Then click on the large gadget to change the text as desired. Most of the text strings are obvious. Several need more explanation, and are described below. QUOTE GREETING TEXT The "Quote Greeting" is inserted at the top of a quoted message. Several special codes are used to allow you to customize the contents of the quote greeting. The permitted codes are listed below. Please note that the case of each code IS important. Your users may create their own quote greetings using the ESC-Z command. Once a user has saved their settings with ESC-Z, they get whatever quote greeting was in effect at the time they saved it. If you change it later in ConfigEditor, those users will not get the new quote greeting. The following codes may be used in the quote greeting: %F The full name of the original message author (FROM). %f The first name of the original message author. %T The full name of the original message author (TO). %S The subject or title of the quoted message. %q The quote attribution of the original message author. This will be either the initials or first name, depending on how you have configured the quote prefix in ConfigEditor. %d The date and time that the quoted message was written. %N A hard newline is inserted at this point. You normally will want to end your quote greeting with a hard newline. %% A single "%" is inserted at this point. Here are some examples: o On %d %F wrote about %S:%N o Dear %f,%N%NYou recently wrote the following message about "%S" to %T:%N o %F wrote the lines marked "%q" in the following quote:%N YES/NO TEXT The "Input yes" and "Input no" text defines what your user will use to answer yes/no questions. Specify the entire word. ScreenEdit will recognize the first character as the value typed by the user. COLORS Click on the gadget above the color pallete to choose which color you want to configure, then select the color from the pallete. The preview window shows you what your users will see using the standard IBM ANSI color pallete. Depending on the terminal program in use, the 8 brighter colors may show up as bold text. BORDER STYLE Click on the Border Style gadget to change the way the border between windows is displayed. Choices include a reverse bar, ANSI single and double lines, and a variety of ASCII characters. Watch the preview window to see the results. The Reverse Bar and ASCII character selections an be displayed on any terminal, while the The single and double line selections require your users to use an IBM ANSI character set. QUOTE PREFIX One of the cycle gadgets lets you choose the style of quoted lines. You may select from the author's first name or initials, and the initials may be either upper or lower case. You may also choose a simple ">" if you would rather not clutter your quotes with names or initials. SPECIAL OPTIONS The Special Options list allows special customization to be done that is not specifically supported by ConfigEditor. Normally you will not need to use this list. Watch for messages on the DLG support echos for special circumstances where the Special Options may be necessary. There are ten entries in the Special Options list. To add a Special Option, click on one of the blank entries in the list, then enter the value in the gadget below the list. To remove one, click on the entry in the list and then blank it out in the gadget below the list. Be very careful when entering Special Options. If you misspell an option, you may cause ScreenEdit to malfunction. SPECIAL WORD WRAP OPTION NOTE: This is available only in the ESC-Z per-user customization command and cannot be set globally using ConfigEditor. Actually, there is a way using the SPECIAL OPTIONS list, but there really should never be a need to set this option globally. The special word wrap option causes ScreenEdit to automatically turn word wrap OFF whenever it is invoked with a normal file. Messages and file descriptions will always have word wrap on by default. The reason for this option is that ScreenEdit can be used with DLGEdit to remotely edit configuration files. Word wrapping must be off when editing those files, else disaster may ensue. The only people likely to set this option are those sysops and co-sysops who regularly edit configuration files remotely. Note that when this option is set, word wrapping will be turned off when creating a DLG bulletin and when adding a comment to a file description. DLG provides no way for ScreenEdit to determine that these particular kinds of files are being edited. If you turn this option on, you will want to use ^XMW to manually turn on word wrapping for those kinds of files. The default behavior for ScreenEdit is to always have word wrapping on. THE SPELLING CHECKER ScreenEdit uses AREXX to communicate with an external spelling checker. Any spelling checker that supports a compatible AREXX interface will work. ScreenEdit has been tested with ISpell version 3.3LJR, and RXSpell, an AREXX spelling checker used by Xenolink. Both ISpell and RXSpell are freely distributable. SETUP You can setup ISpell in either of two ways. The first way will simply cause misspelled words to be flagged, and allows the user to enter a replacment. Specify the following options in ConfigEditor: Spell run run >nil: c:ispell -r AREXX port IRexxSpell Spell check quickcheck Spell exit exit The second way to use ISpell is to have it provide a list of suggested replacements for any misspelled word. The user can then enter the correct word from the list of suggestions, or supply their own word. This is the recommended setup. Specify the following options in ConfigEditor: Spell run run >nil: c:ispell -r AREXX port IRexxSpell Spell check check Spell exit exit To use RXSpell, specify the following options in ConfigEditor: Spell run run >nil: doors:spell/rxspell doors:spell/dict. AREXX port SPELL Spell check CHECKWORD Spell exit QUIT When you configure the spelling checker for the first time, you MUST use ConfigEditor and SAVE the result. Even if you use the default values shown in ConfigEditor, those defaults will only take effect if you SAVE them. Tests show that ISpell uses about 700K of RAM, while RXSpell only uses 70K of RAM. You may want to consider the RAM requirements in choosing which spelling checker to use. USING THE SPELLER To run the spelling checker on the current message, press ESC-C. ScreenEdit will interactively prompt for each misspelled word, asking you for a replacement. If you choose to enter a replacement, the new word will be substituted for the old one. If ISpell has been configured correctly, ScreenEdit will pop up a window containing suggested replacments when a misspelled word is found.