Hot tip of the day! Customize your default status bar This is great news! This is no scam!
As a responsible translator of the Finnish AbiWord I was quite concern when I noticed that I couldn't translate the word "default" which sits on the status bar. This is very irritating because it is almost the only string which defies translation. I couldn't find a way to translate it. Strings.en-us didn't have a corresponding string. Then I thought of the mysterious AbiWord.Profile. I know I shouldn't touch it by hand, at least with AbiWord, but as I said before, I was desperate. I was hilarious when I found my string, KeyBindings="default". I decided to scheme a little. I had heard that this mysterious default has something to do with keyboard emulation. I also knew that AbiWord has a rudimentary emacs and vi support. I copied the string to a scheme named _custom_ and changed the value to KeyBindings="emacs". I quickly changed the file and started AbiWord. It worked! I had now a pretty emacs string. Of course I didn't remember very well the emacs key bindings. As a windows user I use more sensible bindings ;) Luckily for many years ago I had basic course on Unix and some emacs (and vi). I remembered that Ctrl-E goes to the end of line and Ctrl-P is previous line, not print. Not very exiting but it worked! I also tried the escape key, I thought that escape-F and so on should work and I would move by word. Maybe my memory was corrupted or that wasn't the correct meta-character. Of course I remembered the most important emacs command ever, Ctrl-X Ctrl-C and quit promptly. Next I tried to use vi keybindins. I wasn't very happy about it. Almost the only thing I remembered of it was that it was a horrible, horrible program. Almost as bad as edlin was in ms dos. I changed KeyBindings="vi". I wasn't quite sure of this syntax. It is very hard to find information of the correct parameter values. Maybe because you are not encouraged to change them. I started AbiWord. I had now vi sitting on my status bar. I wrote some text and tried escape :q. and other escape combinations. Maybe it was my memory again. Nothing seemed to work. I thought my value was wrong. I dimly remembered as an avid reader of the mail-list that it might be something like vi-keys. I changed the value, status bar responded correspondingly, but the results were the same as before. Then I thought: how is it that I can write non-working values which I can see on the status bar. I tried to experiment a little. I wrote KeyBindings="ISMO". It Worked. Now I had my pretty first name on the status bar. I had personalized my AbiWord! I quickly noticed that it doesn't matter what you write. I tried KeyBindings="Abiword Rulez". I tried also "I LOVE ABI". "I LOVE ABIWORD" was too long string. Maybe we should extend the area? Think about it. You can write to the status bar. I am not suggesting we should add something like scrolling text or something like it. This is still pretty neat! Maybe installer could ask our name or company name and write it to the .profile or we could have a separate dialogue for this string. Maybe we could also sell this space for marketing purposes ;) The choices are endless. If I just knew how to add the heart symbol! Also 8-bit characters didn't seem to work. I (insert heart symbol here) love Abi. PS. I am sorry if went 'little' overboard. I think I was just too excited of this new usage I discovered. I still think the string 'default' doesn't tell anything to your default user. Better would be to leave it empty when it isn't 'emacs' or 'vi' keybindings. Even MS Word doesn't use it. Of course that isn't very heavy argument ;) -- Ismo M�kinen
