>Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 16:16:24 +0000 >From: "Ray Andrews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: arachne-digest V1 #1326 > >Greetings one and all, > >I know it's been covered many times before, but I can't recall where to >look: can someone tell me exactly where I can get all the info that I >need to set up an external text editor under Arachne? Ray and all, this was my last contribution to the topic. I do not aggree with myself any longer. What I described as either-or can coexist. I am now thinking about a function that switches the external editor on and off ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The only thing to do is to replace SYSTEM\GUI\TEXTEDIT.AH. Confer Clarence's MIME.CFG switcher last weekend. This will be better than messing up the edit screen with additional buttons. You will probably find more understandable instruction on the new archive of Arachne list. Go to Clarence's website, http://www.hwcn.org/~ao773/ there is a link to the archive. You can now find everything - a big step forward, indeed! Regards, Christof ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Hello, who it may concern! External editors for Arachne had already been extensively discussed in the list a few weeks ago. After having experimented with the various editors mentioned, I would like to add a few remarks. I wondered a while whether to install an external editor additionally to Arachne's own editor into textedit.ah (alternative A) or to replace the internal editor by an external one (alternative B). Alternative B means three keystrokes more (F4 - TAB - TAB - RETURN instead of just F4) for calling the editor. If you do a lot of editing from within Arachne (eg. building an intranet file system on your harddisk), this actually makes a difference. There are, however other reasons, why you might prefer Alternative A and keep the external editor merely optional. 1. For me, the main reason is this: Arachne's fonts supports any codepage and her internal editor has an own keyboard mapping. If your HTML code contains diacritical characters that are not encoded (or not encodeable) in HTML entities, you will not be able to read and to edit them in an external DOS editor. Example: Your Webpage is in Czech (every third letter is diacritical). In DOS you probably use codepages 852 (Latin II) or 867 (br. Kamenicky). Your online HTML code needs to be encoded in cp1250 or ISO-8859-2. If you do not want to implement ISO-8859-2 on the whole system (yes, this really *is* possible, but causes problems with applications that use semigraphics from cp437), you will not be able to edit text in your language to the HTML file. You will probably edit the diacritical text first and then add the HTML code. Or you edit HTML code and than insert pure text into the HTML file later. Arachne's internal editor allows to edit the characters beyond the pure US-ASCII in a very comfortable way. You just have to go to the options page (local settings) and define your own keyboard according to the selected fonts. Up to now Arachne has add-ons for West European, Central European and Russian codepages. This makes editing very easy, even if the editor is somehow slow. 2. Another thing to consider is the use of Arachne's clipboard. This feature is not accessible in an external editor either. I mostly work in task switching environment with the MS-DOS dosshell. As I need very often to copy and paste small pieces of texts (addresses, phone numbers, URL, document-text) from one application to the other, Arachne's clipboard is very interesting for me. But from outside Arachne, or from an external editor, I cannot use the clipboard. This problem can, however, be solved with a compromise. Arachne offers a hotkey (ALT Q) starting the "quickpad" which is just another GUI calling the internal editor. The name of the GUI file is quickpad.ah. You can edit it in order to change the name of the file to be edited (the default is quickpad.txt). In my DOS- applications I usually copy and paste to a temporary file on my RAM disk (D:\X.TXT). When I replace the default file name quickpad.txt with my "clipboard" file D:\X.TXT, I have a very easy access to it in Arachne. And I need not waste any of the precious ShiftF1... hotkeys for this function. One of the external editors discussed can be used for quick copy/paste function, too: EDIT.COM from the W98 DOS allows you to open a maximum of ten files at the same time. You can call them already on the command line (even with *.*) and switch between them with only one keystroke (Alt1... Alt0). If you install EDIT.COM as an external editor in Arachne, you can automatically open the "clipboard" D:\X.TXT simultaneously with every file to be edited. That means, the "clipboard" is always accessible by ALT 2 whenever the external editor is running. a) insert the following lines to SYSTEM\GUI\TEXTEDIT.AH <FORM ACTION="file:dosedit.dgi"> <BUTTON TYPE=SUBMIT HEIGHT=18> DOS Editor</BUTTON> b) add this line to MIME.CFG file/dosedit.dgi |@call $esystem\\dgi\\dosedit.bat $e $l|arachne $l c) create the SYSTEM\DGI\DOSEDIT.BAT with this contents: @echo off edit.com %2 D:\X.TXT %1 cd %1system cd .. This is almost as good as Arachne's clipboard. So far the results of my playing with editors. Greetings, Christof Lange _______________________________________________ Christof Lange Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic phone: (+420-2) 22 78 18 00 / 22 78 20 02 fax: (+420-2) 22 78 18 01 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
