Forwarded message:
From: Self </lange>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: FAQ External editor
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 02:31:14
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
