Hi list, I have just read the files of Glenn's exeditgm.zip packet which offer a quite consistent implementation of external editor on the base of .dgi scripts.
One disadvantage of that solution, however, is that those who prefer an external editor may not like to call it only indirectly from Arachne's internal editor pages (textedit.ah, sendmail.ah etc.) but even directly *instead* of the editor pages. Replacing the internal editor with an editor of your choice is the main idea of the arachne.cfg variable 'Editor'. It can be changed at the bottom of the opt_misc.ah page. The Editor variable can point to any external DOS program you want. Whenever you press the hotkey F4 this program starts instead of textedit.ah. This way may be far more practical for those who do a lot HTML editing or cutnpaste in Arachne. But the drawback is that Arachne's internal editor is not accessible while 'Editor' is defined. And it can be embarrassing if you always need to return to opt_misc.ah when you just want to swap the editors. Actually there are several reasons why you may need more than one editor: * some texts contain 8bit characters that have to be translated from iso8859 to DOS char sets and vice versa -> either stick to Arachne's internal editor or use a batch file with translation routines * sometimes you need to cut and paste columns of text (eg. when printing broadly layouted web pages) -> Pedit is best for that * sometimes you need to load more than one file at a time -> this is the job of MS-DOS 7.10 Editor * if you edit HTML tags you will be glad about additional tools -> then I may choose an editor with good macro support I think here is still opportunity for some improvement: 1. Terminology: IIRC the external editor topic is not covered in Arachne's documentation. The discussion on the list and the different add-ons and customized .ah files can be quite confusing to newbies. We should aggree on different terms for Arachne's built-in editor, the external program called by F4 directly and the dgi scripts accessible from textedit.ah. May be it would be possible to write a Howto (araxedit.txt) that contains all aspects of use of external editors. In the past, documents of that kind used to be written by Clarence. 2. Dual opening: It is not bad to have one or more buttons on textedit.ah in order to access a particular editor. But I think it is inadequate to use for all kinds of editing the same hot key F4. In the past we discussed several workarounds for switching between editors. I still use Clarence's swapedit.ook with hotkey SHIFT+F4. Swapedit.ook exchanges the default textedit.ah and a textedit.alt - the latter calls the xedit.dgi script with an HTML REFRESH tag. I think workarounds of that kinds are too complicated for beginners and it would be better to include the solution into core.exe. All that is necessary is to link a new hotkey (eg. ALT+F4) to the external program defined by the 'Editor' variable. Eg. Norton commander or Midnight commander offer separate file associations for view, edit, open etc that can be accessed by different keys. In a similar way in Arachne F4 could call the 'Edit' function, and ALT+F4 the 'X(ternal)Edit' or 'Y(our)Edit' function. Is this a new feature for A.171;UE02? Regards Christof Lange _______________________________________________ Christof Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic phone: (+420) 222 78 06 73 / 222 78 20 02 http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
