| Although by now your Opus should have nicely configured filetypes, and you'll have
got to grips with the lister in all its guises, there are always plenty more things to
deal with, along with plenty of shortcuts to achieving them. We'll start with the button
bank editor and see how you're going after that! Button details
By now you'll know that a lot of DOpus' button banks are actually interchangeable items
and consist of discrete objects that can not only be buttons, but dragged and dropped to
become menu entries or toolbar gadgets. You should also know that by ALT clicking on a
button you'll open up the preferences for that button bank - and the settings for that
individual button.
You'll notice that the button bank editor always looks the same no matter whether you
are editing a graphical or text button bank or the toolbar for your lister and there is
always a Settings section on the right-hand side of it. Let's look at that in more detail:
Firstly, if you are in the button bank editor because you are editing a lister toolbar
you'll notice that the vast majority of the flags are ghosted because certain things don't
apply to that kind of toolbar, the same is true of other types, so don't be concerned if
there are buttons that are ghosted, it just means that they are settings that are
inappropriate to this particular sort of button bank.
Those settings in full:
- Full border - If you have this ticked, you'll have a button bank that looks like
a perfectly normal Intuition window with scrollbars, front to back gadgets, the lot. If
you have it unticked, you will get the DOpus style of button bank which can have a drag
bar (which is also the point for right mouse button clicking to get the button bank's
settings). The cycle gadget underneath pretty much says it all, you can set the drag bar
to be on the side you want it, or you can let DOpus choose. Positioning a button bank in a
corner of the screen remains somewhat difficult to do with a drag bar since Opus' idea of
the coordinates of the button bank take the drag bar into consideration rather than just
ignoring it. You may find it easier to simply leave a drag bar on the button bank
somewhere inconspicuous rather than tearing your hair out trying to force the button bank
into the corner of the screen and then turning the bar off.
- Borderless buttons - Hmm, do you want it, don't you? Well, having the border on
the buttons will depend on whether you have text buttons or graphical ones. Quite often
graphical ones will have their own border that looks somewhat like the raised appearance
of an icon, and so won't need an additional border. However, if you have more than one
setting for each button, by turning the Borderless buttons flag on, you will not get the
"dog ears" that show that a button has more than one function. Having borders on
a button bank also, obviously perhaps, increases the button bank's physical size on
screen.
- Simple-Refresh - turning this on can speed up window operations involving button
banks on systems with slow graphics (e.g. AGA). If you are using a graphics card and have
plenty of memory you will probably want to turn it off.
- No 'Dog ears' - normally when a button has more than one function the corner of
it gets turned up like a dog ear in a book, to indicate the presence of additional
functions. This option lets you turn them off. If you have borderless buttons switched on
in a graphical button bank, this switch has no function.
- Auto close, Auto iconify - these flags will set the status of the button bank
once you've clicked on them. For instance, you might want to set up two button banks - one
for going online with a TCP stack, one for going offline. Once online, you could set the
online button bank to close (since you can't go online more than once at a time) and load
the offline button bank. The same thing happens here, only in reverse.
- Active Popups - This flag allows you to determine whether or not you wish to use
the new DOpus behaviour for buttons with more than one function whereby the button turns
into a mini-kind of start menu, or you wish to use the old style which was to allow the
user to select the function they wished to use which would then be hence the topmost
button selectable with a LMB click.
There are two more functions in here. One is "Paint mode", which, like the
similarly-named tool in Opus 4 allows you to pick foreground and background colours from a
pair of palettes and simply click on the buttons in the bank you are editing to turn them
the colours you have selected. The Clipboard function is a bit more involved and allows
you to open a window onto which buttons can be dragged and dropped. You can do this as
many times as you need and then drag the buttons from the clipboard onto the button bank
of your choice. This function also works if you close down the button bank you were
originally editing and start editing another making moving buttons very simple.
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If you aren't getting the result you expect from a hotkey, perhaps it's already in
use? Use the "Key Finder..." item in the Opus menu to find out if that's the
problem. |
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Still with us? Good. We'll move on now to more esoteric stuff...
Pick a chapter:
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