POPCLI III by John Toebes © 1987 The Software Distillery. Contributions to continue development of this and other fine products for the Amiga should be sent to the Software Distillery at the above address. Other Products produced by the Software Distillery are: BLINK - the Turbo-charged Alink replacement HACK - The Amiga port of the famous UNIX game LARN - Another famous UNIX game MEMWATCH - Protects your machine from random trashes MAKE - A software development tool one shouldn't be without KERMIT - The World renown file transfer protocol brought to the Amiga ICONEXEC, SETALTERNATE, SETWINDOW - Icon manipulation tools TSIZE - A short utility for determining directory sizes. All of these are available on our BBS. Permission is hereby granted to distribute this program provided both this documentation accompanies the executable and that no charge is made for its distribution. POPCLI (pronounced POP-SEE-EL-EYE) is designed to solve two problems at once. First it provides a simple way of starting another CLI at any time without having to load workbench or exit whatever program you may be using. Second it has a builtin screen saver mode that automatically turns off the Amiga display when there has been no input for a given period of time. Once POPCLI is running, you can use it to get a new CLI from whatever program you are running by pressing Left Amiga and ESC at the same time. What this does is to bring the workbench screen to the front and then start up a new CLI window on the workbench screen. This is extremely handy when you start a program from CLI and then find you need to do a CLI command. The other function that POPCLI performs is to blank the screen for you. This saves on the wear of the monitor phospher. It will do this for you automatically any time that you have not pressed any key or moved the mouse for a given period of time regardless of what has been written to the screen. This is useful when you leave the Amiga on unattended so that you don't have to mess with the brightness control or worse yet tunr the monitor off putting wear and tear on its power supply. Furthermore it only takes a touch of the mouse or any key on the keyboard to bring it all back. To use POPCLI, you need to execute the command: POPCLI Where is any number of seconds after which the screen saver is to go into effect. If nothing is specified it defaults to turning off the screen after 300 seconds. (Five minutes) Note that it makes its decision to shut blank the screen solely upon the absence of any keyboard, gameport, or mouse input. Even if a program is printing to the screen it will shut down. This is not a problem, to unblank the screen merely move the mouse or touch any key (SHIFT or CTRL are excellent choices since they don't do anything). is the scan code of the key that you wish to act as the command executer. By default this is the Escape key although you may set it to any other key if an application you use wants to conflict with PopCLI's choice. is the command to be executed when the Left Amiga and ESC keys are pressed simaultaneously. By default the command is NEWCLI >NIL: to bring up a CLI window in the center of the screen. Note the >NIL: on the command to supress any output that the NEWCLI program may give. This is important because at the time the command is executed, the original window may be long gone. If you wish to have a CLI come up elsewhere on the screen you can put the window definition in the command such as: NEWCLI >NIL: CON:0/0/640/200/MYCLI Which will open a CLI to fill the entire screen. POPCLI does no parsing on the command, merely passing the ENTIRE string without any processing to AmigaDOS. If you wish to specify a command with POPCLI you must include the seconds value followed by one or more spaces. Some valid commands are: POPCLI 200 POPCLI 200 NEWCLI >NIL: CON:0/0/640/100/MYWINDOW POPCLI 10 POPCLI 180 NEWCLI >NIL: CON:0/10/640/120/POPUP Terminating POPCLI: ------------------- Once PopCLI has been installed, you can terminate it with the command: POPCLI QUIT You can change the default interval by giving a number: POPCLI 5 - sets the default timeout to 5 seconds. This is handy when you want to blank the screen immediately. Setting the interval to a very large number: POPCLI 99999 Will keep PopCLI from blanking your screen. Note that you can also use this to change the command that it executes or even the default key. Setting the interval does not affect the command to be executed. Installing PopCLI: ------------------ To install a copy of POPCLI on your workbench, put a copy of POPCLI in your C directory and edit the Startup-Sequence file in the S directory to add a POPCLI command of your own taste. Notes: 1) POPCLI blanks the screen by creating a one bit-blane lo-res screen in front of all other screens and setting the background color to solid black. It then turns off the display freeing the cycles for any program that might be running. 2) Once the screen blanks, if the AMIGA is left undisturbed for 68.096 years the screen may briefly flash back on for the next 68.096 years. I have not taken the time to test this. If this turns out to be a problem, please let me know. Enhancements Provided under POPCLI II: * POPCLI now runs from WORKBENCH. An icon is provided for doing so. When run from workbench, the default command and default times will be used. * When run from CLI, the original window now goes away. In doing so, it also appears that incompatibilities with 1.2 have been removed. Please feel free to comment on potential future improvements. * The size of the screen used to blank the display has been reduced to reduce memory required to blank the screen. * POPCLI has been recompiled to take advantage of the latest features of 3.04 Lattice and BLINK. Although source is being distributed, it is not likely that a version of POPCLI could be reconstructed without these products. Enhancements Provided under PopCLI III: * POPCLI has again been recompiled with Lattice 4.0 and Blink 6.9. The source provided will NOT compile with other than the latest version of Lattice. * POPCLI now self installs itself using the seglist splitting technique of CBack. Because of this, you may freely change the timeout interval or command without having to reboot your machine.