************************************************************************** The Bin 37.22 The Trashcan that actually deletes ! SmallBin 37.02 A Trashcan for Toolmanager © Copyright 1994 by Maarten ter Mors ************************************************************************** Table of contents : Introduction What the hell is The Bin ? System requirements What do I need to use The Bin ? Installation How to install The Bin Tooltypes Options accepted by The Bin Using The Bin The Bin in everyday use Introducing SmallBin Yet another Bin ?? SmallBin Installation How to get it there About the author That's me ! :-) Introduction ------------ Ever wanted to delete something quickly, and comfortably ? Ever felt the need for a Trashcan that deleted something immediately, without having to chose something from an obscure Workbench menu ? Ever wondered why you couldn't put your Trashcan icon on the Workbench screen, so that you wouldn't have to open that window every time you wanted to throw something away ? If you have been able to answer 'yes' to any of these questions, help is on the way. Help in the form of The Bin, a commodity Trashcan that is fully localized and will enable you to get rid of unwanted files the easy way. It was written originally to be able to escape from the 'Delete' option from the Workbench menu. The Trashcan in its current form is a nice idea, but how often have you used it other than putting something there and then subsequently deleting it straight away with 'Empty Trash' ? The Bin will save you the hassle. The Bin is freely distributable under the FreeWare concept. This means that you may, you are even encouraged to, give this program to your friends, upload it to BBS systems, put it on Public Domain disks and so on. The only conditions here are that : 1) You do not make any money out of The Bin without the author's written permission (hey, I'll want my share ! :-). 2) You do not change anything in the distribution, do not add, delete, modify or rename any of the files in this package. This ensures that everyone who receives The Bin will get a complete distribution, that works and has these copyright messages in it. If you have any suggestions, you found a bug or you just want to say 'Hey, what a great/lousy program, then you can always contact me. System Requirements ------------------- You don't need one heck of a system to use The Bin, since it's only a rather small program. It will consume only a few kilobytes of memory, but depending on the amount you still have availible for other programs, this may still be too much. If you're low on memory already and you don't want to waste any on a Trashcan, refer to the SmallBin section, which might be for you. The absolute minimum system configuration for using The Bin is : * Amiga with Kickstart V37 (2.x) or higher. * Workbench V37 (for localisation you need V38) * 20 kB of free disk space (that's kilobytes, not megabytes ; this isn't MS-Windows ! :-) * 50 kB of free RAM (can vary, depending on icon used and catalogs) Installation ------------ The installation of The Bin is fully automated using Commodore's Installer utility. Unfortunately, this piece of software is copyrighted and I therefor cannot supply it to you. It should be on the Install disk that came with your system and to be able to use the installation script provided with The Bin, it should also be in your default path (try C:, for example). If you do have it, but it isn't in your path, set the default tool of the installer script to :Installer. NOTE : If you intend to install SmallBin, refer to SmallBin Install. If you don't have the Installer or you are unable to find it right now, don't worry, because installation by hand is quite easy as well. Here's a step-by-step guide to installing The Bin on your system : 1) Start a new Shell. 2) Go to the Bin directory with CD ":The Bin", where : is the volume label of the disk, for example RAM: or something. Of course, this can also be a path, like DH2:Download/. 3) Type the following lines, each followed by : Copy Bin Sys:WBStartup/ Copy Bin.info Sys:WBStartup/ If you don't want the locale files (the program will default to the English language), then the installation is complete as far as you're concerned. If you do want the language catalog(s), then follow steps 4 and 5 as well. 4) Change the directory to Locale/Catalogs by CD Locale/Catalogs 5) Copy the languages you want to your Locale: assign (usually also on your system disk), with : Copy all TO Locale:Catalogs/ for example : Copy italiano all TO Locale:Catalogs/italiano That's it ! From the next reboot, you'll have The Bin on your screen ! (See also the section on tooltype options, @{"Tooltypes" LINK Tooltypes}. Tooltype options ---------------- The Bin takes a number of options, which you can specify through ToolTypes. These have to be set before the program is run, just after the installation is a good idea for example. ICONX Tooltype Template : ICONX/N Use : Specifies the X coordinate of the Bin AppIcon on the screen. Example : ICONX=200 ICONY Tooltype Template : ICONY/N Use : Specifies the Y coordinate of the Bin AppIcon on the screen. Example : ICONY=50 ICON Tooltype Template : ICON Use : Specify a different icon for the AppIcon on screen. This can be useful if you don't like the standard Icon, but don't want to change the icon of The Bin program. Specify an icon of any type (Tool, Project, Trash etc.), but without the '.info' extension. So if your icon is called Sys:Trashcan.info, use Sys:Trashcan. Example : ICON=Work:Rubbish/Icons/NewToilet ICONNAME Tooltype Template : ICONNAME Use : Allows you to change the text under the Bin icon. For example, if you don't like the standard 'Trashbin' text, you could change it to something else, like the name of a person you vehemently dislike. Example : ICONNAME=Toilet FORCE ToolType Template : FORCE/S Use : This switch allows you to override any delete protection files may have. It can be very annoying to want to delete an entire directory with many files and subdirectories in it, and some nutcase programmer has set all delete protection bits to true. Examples : FORCE=YES FORCE=NO CAUTION : Files are usually protected from deletion for a reason, i.e. they contain important data or they are crucial for some program to run. If you tend to get weary after a lot of work, you could set the bit yourself so that you don't delete it accidentally. If you have a habit of deleting the wrong stuff by accident, do NOT use this flag ! CX_PRIORITY Tooltype Template : CX_PRIORITY/N Use : Set the priority of the program in the commodity list. As of version 37.22, this really isn't much use. Since The Bin does not use any input handlers, this is best set to 0. Example : CX_PRIORITY=0 Using The Bin ------------- Well, that's what you got it for, isn't it ? This program is actually usable ! :-)) Deleting Files or Drawers ========================= This section applies to both the Bin and SmallBin ; after correct installation both work identically. Using The Bin is really, really easy. After startup, you can drop icons on top of the Trashbin icon (name and image set by the ICONNAME and ICON tooltypes respectively). The Bin will pop up a requester with all the selected files and/or drawers (disks are not supported (yet)) in a large listview-like gadget with a scroller bar. To view all the names, move the scroller about and the view will scroll along smoothly. There are two gadgets at the bottom, Delete and Cancel. If you select Delete, The Bin will do its stuff and the files will be deleted from the disk. Depending on the state of the FORCE tooltype, delete protected files will also be deleted. If you choose Cancel or click the window's close gadget, no action will be taken and the Bin will go back to sleep mode. Your files will not be deleted and the icons will remain selected. Removing The Bin from Memory ============================ This section only applies to The Bin program, SmallBin does not stay resident in the Amiga's memory. If you have had enough of the Bin, you can remove it from memory in three different ways, of which two are easy and one is for emergencies only, but can be used from batch files : 1) Double-clicking on the Bin's icon on the Workbench screen. The program will put up a requester asking for confirmation. 2) Using the Commodities Exchange program, choose 'Remove' with The Bin selected. There will be no requester and The Bin will clean up after itself quietly. 3) Sending the program a Ctrl-C break. This was mainly put in for debugging purposes, but it could be useful. If you don't know how to send a program a break, you probably won't need it anyway. SmallBin documentation ---------------------- While testing and debugging The Bin on my 2 MB A1200, it occured to me that it was really a bit silly to have the program in memory all the time just to delete something now and then. This problem became even more urgent because I tend to load a lot of stuff in the background, like for example the excellent Toolmanager by Stefan Becker. However, it was Toolmanager that gave me an idea. When you want an AppIcon on the screen, you need to have a program resident to catch the messages it sends when (an) icon(s) is/are dropped on top of it, so with the standard Bin setup, there was no way around this and the program just had to remain resident, as a commodity in this case. But when running Toolmanager, there is no need for this residentness, because Toolmanager itself is already resident and it can wait for the messages and activate The Bin, or SmallBin in this case, leaving that to do the dirty work. The name SmallBin is not because the actual program is so small ; the difference is only some 2K and internally, the difference between The Bin and SmallBin is only in the startup code, which is larger with The Bin. SmallBin therefor offers all the features of The Bin, such as the localisation, the nice requester etc. The name is SmallBin because of the small memory usage compared with The Bin. All you need is an icon on the Workbench, a couple of bytes in Toolmanager and off you go. As you might have guessed by now, this program is only useful when you already have TM running as standard. If you have to install it separately (you could though - it's really great), you'll lose more memory than you gain. There is one more disadvantage in using SmallBin instead of The Bin and that is that it isn't resident. This may seem obvious and really, it is, but when you're using floppies or a very slow hard drive, you are probably better off with The Bin. Every time you want to delete something, you see, Toolmanager will have to load the program into memory and if it happens to be on your system disk, you'll have to insert that etc. Also, it takes just a little more time than The Bin, of course, but with modern hard drives I doubt you'll notice it. See also : SmallBin Installation SmallBin Installation --------------------- The installation of SmallBin is a little, but not much, trickier than that of The Bin. An installer script is provided to do it the easy way, but since not everyone has the C= Installer, there is also a simple way to do it by hand (if you use the Installer, go on straight away to Toolmanager): 1) Open a new Shell 2) Go to the Bin directory with CD ":The Bin", where : is the volume label of the disk, for example RAM: or something. Of course, this can also be a path, like DH2:Download/. 3) Type the following lines, each followed by : Copy SmallBin : Copy SmallBin.info : : can be anywhere you like, from SYS: to DH6:Files/OtherStuff/Misc/Etc/. You just have to feed this path to Toolmanager later on. If you also want the locale files, do these two steps as well, else continue to Toolmanager. 4) Change the directory to Locale/Catalogs by CD Locale/Catalogs 5) Copy the languages you want to your Locale: assign (usually also on your system disk), with : Copy all TO Locale:Catalogs/ for example : Copy italiano all TO Locale:Catalogs/italiano Installing SmallBin inside ToolManager ====================================== Most of the information you need can be found in the ToolManager documentation, which comes with the package. Since TM is not a commercial program and the documentation comes supplied freely, I see no reason why you shouldn't have it. To install SmallBin into ToolManager, take the following three steps : 1) Create an Exec object. For convenience's sake, name it 'SmallBin' and set the program to where you have installed SmallBin. Make sure it is a WB program, else the program will NOT work. You needn't bother with hotkey, path, stack etc. The default values will do. Important : do make sure the 'Arguments' box is checked. If not, SmallBin will not work either. 2) Create an Image object. This can be anything, as long as ToolManager can cope with it - including animbrushes and icons with two images. Not an awful lot to set here, really. 3) Create an Icon object. Give it a suitable name, a name that means 'Trash' to you, like 'MS-DOS' for example ;-) Then choose the Exec and Icon objects you just created and finally, position the icon. Decide if you want to have the name shown (I could imagine you don't want 'MS-DOS' on your screen :) and click OK. Now make sure you save your ToolManager preferences and from the next time TM is started, you will have a trashbin on your screen. To see if it works, create some crap files on the Ram Disk for example and drop them on top of the icon. If all goes well, the familiar The Bin requester should pop up and ask you to confirm deletion. If there is something wrong, carefully check that you did all above actions correctly. About the Author ---------------- You can reach the author of this program, me in other words, in two different ways. The first is by ordinary mail, you know, the stuff with paper and all. The second and preferred method is by electronic mail or email, because this is cheaper, easier and possibly faster for both of us. My home address is : Maarten ter Mors Hendrik Vinkhof 47 2202 XJ Noordwijk The Netherlands My email address is : maarten.ter.mors@aobh.wlink.nl And you can also reach me at : FidoNet 2:280/464.6 AmigaNet 39:151/1.6 NLA 14:102/203.6 DAN 55:100/111.6 Bye !