Masterclass


If you have an Amiga with Workbench 3.1 (or Workbench 2),
you may have noticed that three seemingly useless drawers
always seem to appear in the Ram Disk. You can check for
them now: double click on the Ram Disk and select the
"Show... All Files" option from the Window Workbench menu.

These drawers are set up by the Amiga's Workbench as it
loads, and I have often been asked what purpose they serve.
Sometimes I'm asked why can't the drawers simply be deleted
to gain more free memory. Hopefully, after this Masterclass
you'll see that the drawers in Ram disk are actually
extremely useful and well worth keeping.

The first of these drawers is the T (for temporary)
directory, and in here some programs occasionally store
information that they need to keep track of. For example, if
you use Directory Opus to call image viewing programs it
will often generate some data and store it in the T
directory. The mail program Spot will keep text files in T
whilst they are edited. AmigaDOS script files often open
files in T whilst they work.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to delete this data
or re-directing it to disk: it's stored in Ram simply to
speed operations up. It could be stored on disk instead, but
on a single-floppy system this could bring about a lot of
tedious disk swapping, and even on a hard drive system it
would waste time. Another reason why T is located in Ram is
because the information stored there isn't vital to national
security by any means, and if the information is lost when
the computer is switched off then no-one will cry too much.

Clipboards

The second drawer is the Clipboards directory. Whenever you
use Copy or Cut from a program, it should theoretically
store whatever has been copied or cut in a special device
called the Clipboard. For example, text editors should store
the text cut or copied in the Clipboard. Again, it's a
matter of speed and the non-vital nature of the data which
makes the Ram disk the perfect location, but with Clipboards
comes the option to share the data between different
programs, as data stored there should be kept in a standard
format. Unfortunately, not all programs use the Clipboard in
the proper way (or at all), but those that do can be
particularly useful.

Often I find it a great time saver to snip text from an
AmigaDOS Shell window and paste it into the text editor
Cygnus Ed. With a public domain utility such as PowerSnap it
is even possible to paste into file requestors, which is
incredibly useful if you have a very long path to try and
retype several times.

If you keep watch in Clipboards, you won't often see any
data actually appearing in the Clipboards directory itself,
but if you do you will know what it's for and that deleting
it probably isn't a good idea.

Environmental Archives

Probably the most interesting secret Ram drawer in the ENV
directory. When the Amiga boots from floppy or hard disk
into the Workbench, it has quite a lot of setting up to do:
which is one reason it seems to take so long. At one point
in the booting procedure, the ENV drawer is created in the
Ram Disk. Into this drawer is copied the entire contents of
the ENVARC directory, which has been stored on the bootdisk
in the path SYS:Prefs/Env-Archive.

ENVARC stores vital information which the Amiga Workbench,
and any other programs you may have installed, need to know
when started. The Amiga will want to know which screen mode
to use, the overscan preference settings, the chosen font,
which printer, which colours to use... all this information
needs to be stored somewhere permanently or it would need to
be re-set each time the Amiga was switched on. Other
programs will also need to store their various settings, and
ENVARC provides a neat and sensible way to keep track of all
these settings. Each program creates its own drawer inside
ENVARC, and keeps all its own private data in there, where
it knows it can count on it being stored. The program IPrefs
in the startup-sequence looks at the ENV settings to make
sure the Workbench is set up properly when the Amiga boots.

For speed, the Workbench and other programs normally obtain
their settings directly from the ENV directory. When you use
a Preferences tool (such as Screenmode) you'll see two
options: SAVE and USE. If you select USE, the changes in the
settings are copied solely to the ENV drawer. This means the
new settings will be available to any programs (or the
Workbench) from time time onwards. However, switch the
computer off and on again, and the changes will be lost:
this is because the changes were only stored in memory.

On the other hand, if you use the SAVE option, the settings
are altered in ENV as before, but also in the ENVARC
directory on the disk. So next time the computer is switched
on, the settings are copied from ENVARC to ENV as usual and
the new settings will be in operating.

This means that the USE option is very handy for testing out
new preferences, because you can always be sure that to get
back to normal all you need to do is reset the computer.
Only the SAVE option will make the changes permanent.

If you look in your ENV drawer, you may find drawers which
have names similar to your software. For example, I have a
Mosaic directory in ENV, which contains my preferences for
the Mosaic World Wide Web program. I also have drawers for
AdPro, CED and quite a few other programs: all were added
automatically at the time the software was installed. It can
be informative to look in this files, and sometimes if you
have deleted a program because you don't use it anymore, you
can reclaim some space by removing the entry from the ENVARC
directory. Remember that deleting the files in ENV only
won't actually do much, as next time the computer is reset
the files will be copied back into memory. Only delete file
you are absolutely sure you don't need any more. If you are
experimenting with AmiTCP and internet software, you will
soon collect a vast repetoire of files in your ENV drawer,
and it pays to try and keep track of them all.

In ENV, look out for files such as "Kickstart" and
"Workbench". They are created at boot time and contain the
release versions of the Amiga operating system in case any
programs needs to know what type of machine they are running
on. Don't bother deleting them: they only take up a few
bytes anyway.


Icons

Other interesting information is kept in the ENV drawer.
Have you ever wondered where the default settings for the
Workbench icons are set? The images for all the trashcan,
drawers, disks and tools?

When a drawer is created from the Workbench, the icon used
is copied from the image contained in
ENV:Sys/def_drawer.info. By saving your own image in this
directory with this name, you can alter what happens when
you create a new drawer. The same is true for projects and
other files: you can add your own icons by altering these
default images. Try saving the ENV rather than the ENVARC
version and then examining the Ram disk drawers to see how
the finished drawers will appear.

Each disk can also have a unique icon associated with it. If
you look at a directory listing of a hard drive partition,
you might see an icon named disk.info, and this is the
graphic displayed for the disk. Using IconEdit you can save
your own image (which is how I get the comic characters to
appear on my Workbench). Like any other icon, you can edit
them and re-save them. This will mean that any subsequent
drawers created with have the new graphic to go with them.
The "SAVE AS DEFAULT" option in the Icon Editor program
saves the new images to ENV and ENV as you would expect.

When saving icons you MUST remember to set their type
correctly. You must ensure a disk icon is set to a disk
icon, and not a drawer, tool or project.

The only really tricky icon to change is the Ram Disk icon.
As you might expect, it isn't possible to create a .info
file for the Ram disk as it would vanish as soon as the
Amiga was switched off. There isn't a special setting for
the Ram Disk in the ENV drawer, and instead you will need to
resort to a little jiggery pokery. The simplest way to make
sure your Ram Disk has a shiny new icon is to add a line
like this:

copy > nil: sys:s/plop.info to ram:disk.info

to your user-startup script file. Thus, when the Amiga boots
up, it will execute the user-startup file as per usual and
copy the new icon (plop.info) over the Ram Disk's default.
Save you own icon called plop.info in the location of your
choice, and then add a similar line to your start-up
sequence.

This messing around with the default icon settings and
adding lines to the start-up sequence is exactly how Magic
Workbench system manages to replace all the boring default
icons with the very pretty shaded versions it uses. 


Nice Workbench?

If you have created a really cool Workbench environment,
please let us see. We'll publish the smartest looking screen
displays here, so others can see what a clever dick you are
and can also try and improve their own surroundings. Let's
banish old blue and grey displays for ever! Send an IFF
snapshot of your Workbench on disk to the magazine, or by
e-mail to cuamiga@cix.compulink.co.uk, or 2:443/13.4. Let's
see what you can come up with!




captions


drawers1.iff

Here are the three "hidden" drawers which always appear in
the Ram disk. Notice how I have designed new Icons for them
by loading in ENV:sys/def_drawer.info and shrinking them
slightly. As you can see, a little more work is required.



prefs.iff

Each of the preferences tools (here with their MagicWB
icons) can either Save or Use the settings made to them.


saveuse.iff

If you select USE from a preferences requestor like this,
the settings are written to ENV, in ram. However, select
SAVE and the settings are also stored in ENVARC, which is on
disk and therefore "permanent".

types.iff

Remember that each icon MUST have it's type set correctly.
All drawers must be drawers, all disks set to disks and so
on, or odd things can happen.