Externals Manual

  Updated January 17, 1998

Each of the standard OtherMenu externals is documented below, with its current version number.  Remember that if you select an external from the menu with the shift key held down, then you will get a dialog box which shows the version and may allow you to change some settings.

There are three icons for OtherMenu externals, corresponding to their form, all pictured above (if you are reading this document in TeachText, SimpleText, or Tex-Edit).  See the web site for information on writing your own externals if you are a programmer.  All three types become menu items in OtherMenu, and, for the most part, we will ignore their differences here.

Clip Info
1.2

This external provides a submenu listing the types of data on the system clipboard, and how much memory they take up.  If there is text on the clipboard, the submenu also gives a word count and line count.  For example, if you copy some styled text to the clipboard, you might see something like:

TEXT: 175 bytes
styl: 22 bytes
----------------
Lines: 4
Words: 21

For the purpose of this count, a “word” is defined to be any string of characters other than space, option-space, return, or tab.

Some applications have private clipboards, which may have different contents from the system clipboard.  Switching from one application to another should bring the clipboards into sync.

Copy File…
 1.2.6

First you choose a file, then you can save it elsewhere, with another name if you like.  The bottom of the save dialog shows the size of the file and the amount of free space on the disk.  A copy in progress can be cancelled by typing command-period or escape.

If you save over an existing file, you will see an alert asking you to confirm the action and letting you know how the modification dates compare.  Specifically, if the file you are saving is newer than the existing file, the alert will say “Replace older <filename>?”, and if the file you are saving is older (a less likely situation) the alert will say “Replace NEWER <filename>?”.  If the dates are the same, the alert will be the familiar “Replace existing <filename>?”.  File replacements will be done by a fail-safe method, so long as there is enough disk space to do so.  That is, the copy will be created in a temporary location, and only when it is complete will the old copy be deleted and replaced by the copy.

Date/Time
2.0

Displays a submenu showing the date and the time in customizable formats.  Selecting one pastes it into the current document.

The configuration dialog shows your date formats in a list, in which you can drag items to reorder them, or option-drag to duplicate an item.  Use the New and Delete buttons to add or remove items.  In the Code field, you can enter part codes using a menu or by typing, and you can type any literal text you want to appear as part of the date/time text.  The Result area displays what the text will be after the part codes are replaced by dates or times. 

If you hold the shift key as you select a part from the menu, you will get the ALL CAPS version of the part.  For example, to get the AM or PM part, hold shift as you choose “am or pm” from the Parts menu.

The first five part formats available are affected by Apple’s Date & Time control panel.

Your settings for Date/Time are stored in a “Date/Time Settings” file in the “OtherMenu External Preferences” subfolder of the Preferences folder. 

Delete...
 1.3

Delete a file or folder.  This removes the item immediately, rather than putting it in the Trash.  Normally, you will see an alert saying something like “Are you sure you want to delete <filename>?”.  You can turn off this confirmation, using the configuration dialog, but be careful; deleting a file cannot be undone.  You can also control whether or not locked files should be deleted anyway.

Desktop Info...
 1.4

Utility for poking around in the desktop database.  This may not be useful for anyone but programmers.  It shows what icons and sizes are associated with a given creator code.  You may sometimes see the word “paul” in place of an icon; this item stores information related to drag-and-drop.

Empty Trash
1.1

Like selecting “Empty Trash” in the Finder, except that you don’t get a dialog asking if you’re sure.  If you want to empty the trash in spite of locked files therein, hold shift and option as you invoke Empty Trash.

File Info...
 1.3.3

Get some information about a file such as data and size, and show or change attributes such as type and creator.  In the case of applications, it can alter the memory partition size.

If a file is locked, then an application cannot open it for write access without first unlocking it.  The name locked attribute prevents one from using the Finder to rename the file or give it a custom icon.  The invisible attribute makes the file invisible to the Finder, but not necessarily to directory dialogs like the File Info dialog.  The has BNDL attribute, sometimes called the “bundle bit”, indicates a file that owns an icon family; usually applications, control panels, and extensions have this attribute, and ordinary documents do not.

Find...
 1.1.1

This external can be used to search for files and folders, either in a directory dialog or not.  It can search for a string of text in the name of a file or folder, or in the data or resources of a file.  The search is case-insensitive.  The search engine is accelerated for PowerPC.

After you type the string to search for, click the Search button.  The cursor will turn into a spinning beachball, a progress bar will appear, and any matching files will be added to the “Found” list.  You can stop a search by typing command-period.  At most 400 files can fit in the list, but the search will continue on past that so that you can at least see the count.

Double-clicking a found file, or selecting it and then clicking OK, has the same effect as selecting the file with OtherMenu’s menu.  That is, if you brought up the Find dialog in front of a directory dialog, then the file will be displayed in the directory dialog, and otherwise OtherMenu will try to open or launch the file.

When you select a found file, the path list will display that file and the folders that contain it.  If you wish, you can double-click one of these folders instead of the file itself, to make the folder open in the Finder.  Selecting an item in the path list and clicking OK has the same effect.

Searching in names will be much faster than searching in data or resources.  When searching in data or resources, the beachball will slow down when Find is looking in large files.

Everything in the Find dialog can be controlled by the keyboard if you like.  As usual, pressing command-period is equivalent to pressing the Cancel button (unless a search is in progress) and pressing the return or enter key is equivalent to pressing the outlined button.  Also, you can click the Search button using command-s, and click the Names, Data, and Resources checkboxes using command-n, command-d, and command-r.  Using the tab key, you can shift the input focus from the find string box to one of the list boxes.  (The box that is selected in this way has a double outline.)  When a list is the input focus, you can scroll or select items using the arrow keys, typing initial letters of a file name, or using the extended keyboard keys home, end, page up, page down.

If you select an item in one of the lists and hold down command-i, you will see an OtherMenu “Instant Info” box for that item.

It is possible to search for strings containing various hard-to-type characters using special “escape sequences”.  For instance, to search for files whose data contains a tab character at the end of a line, you could search for the string “\t\r”.  The meanings of the escape sequences are:

    \t   tab
    \r   carriage return (hard line break)
    \l   line feed (usually not used in Mac files, but appears in DOS and Unix text)
    \\   translated to a single backslash character
    \xx  where xx are two hexadecimal digits

If a backslash is followed by anything else, it is taken literally.

If you select something from OtherMenu’s menu while the Find dialog is showing, then the item you select will be added to the “Disks” list.  In this way, you can restrict the search to folders or even  individual files rather than whole disks.  One caveat:  When searching in names only, it may actually be slower to search a folder than to search the whole volume containing the folder!

If you are using a double-byte script system such as Japanese, you may see some false matches, especially when searching for a very short string.

Finder Folders
 1.0.1

This external is unlike any of my other externals, in that it creates a submenu that itself has submenus.  It lists the folders that are open on the Finder desktop.  This requires a scriptable Finder, as in System 7.5 or later.

I think of this external as an “active alias”.  It shows the contents of a “Finder Folders” folder that it creates in your Preferences folder, which is kept up to date by OtherMenu.

Hard to Soft Wrap
 1.3.3

Edits text on the clipboard by replacing any isolated carriage return with a space.  Multiple carriage returns are left alone. A carriage return at the very beginning or end is deleted. Since this does not do anything immediately visible, it plays a sound when it completes successfully.

This is not a true external, but a special little application.  I made it an application to fix some clipboard conversion problems.  Since it is an application, you cannot invoke it while a modal dialog is on screen, unlike normal externals.

The application is actually a shell containing a Clipboard Magician conversion resource (CNVT and CNV!).  If you have Clipboard Magician, you could duplicate the shell and use the Magic Wand Utility to move a different conversion resource into it.  

KeyQuencer Macros
 1.0.1

Displays a submenu of macros defined in KeyQuencer 1.2.2 or later.  If you hold the option key, the menu will show only those macros for which you have not assigned a keystroke.

Make Alias As...
 1.3.5

Make an alias for a file, folder, or volume, and put it where you like.  This is very useful for setting up your OtherMenu Folder.  See also QuickAlias.

Memory Map
 1.6

Find out how much memory each application is using, and how much is left.  When you don’t have enough free memory to launch another application, this will help you understand why, and let you see which applications you could quit to make room for a new one.  You can also select applications and tell them to quit.

When you quit applications, they will usually quit within a few seconds, and the list will update to show the new free memory.  However, if you quit the foreground application, or an application that does not understand AppleEvents, then it may not quit until after you close the Memory Info window.  Also be aware that an application that has unsaved data will probably want to ask you whether to save it before it quits.

Optionally, the map displays locked blocks of temporary memory as well as applications.  There are many small ones (less than 1K) associated with launching any application, so I would suggest not displaying the small ones to avoid cluttering the list.  Only a few applications create larger blocks of temporary memory.

Clicking the “Settings” button brings up the settings dialog, so that you can more easily change the temporary memory setting and the display colors.

The amounts shown in Memory Map will not be exactly the same as those in the Finder’s “About this Macintosh” display.  In particular, what the Finder shows as “System Software” includes what I call “System heap”, “High RAM”, “Finder”, and possibly other items.

Monitor Depth
 1.1.1

Set the color depth of the monitor, using a submenu.  If there is more than one monitor, it controls the one with the greatest depth.  If two have the same depth, I'm not sure what happens.  Obviously, if your Mac does not support color or gray-scale, you can trash this.

Changes in depth made by this external are forgotten when you restart your Mac, unlike the Monitors control panel.

Move to Trash...
 2.1.1

Move selected files or folders to the trash.  The Add button moves a selected item from the main list to the lower list of items to be trashed, and the Done button tells the Finder to trash the selected items.

Move/Rename...
 1.3.1

Move or rename something.  One can only move something within a volume, as in Finder.

New Folder...
 2.0.1

Since some Save dialogs do not have a New Folder button, this external does pretty much the same thing:  It shows a secondary dialog in which you can type the name of a new subfolder, and when you click OK, the Save dialog is ready to save a file in the new folder.

Open...
 1.3.1

Selecting something (file or folder) with this is rather like selecting it in Finder and then selecting Open from the Finder menu.  In some cases, especially when Finder is not running, this may be able to launch something when OtherMenu itself cannot.

Paste Clips
 1.4

Stores several frequently-used scraps of text, and displays a submenu so that you can select one to be pasted into a document.  You give each clipping a short label, which identifies it in the menu.  The configuration dialog lets you add, delete, modify, or reorder the clippings.  The New and Delete buttons should be fairly obvious, but you might not guess that you can rearrange the list by dragging a cell of the list and dropping it in a different position.  You can also duplicate an item by option-dragging to a different spot. The Import button can be used to load clippings from older versions of Paste Clips (back to 1.2) or from Paste Clips Settings files.

The label can be up to 31 characters long, and the clipping can be up to 10K bytes long.  If the label begins with a hyphen, the item will appear as a dividing line in the menu.

The clippings are stored in a “Paste Clips Settings” file in the “OtherMenu External Preferences” subfolder of the Preferences folder.  If you rename a copy of Paste Clips, for example to “Favorite Sayings”, then its clippings would be in a file named “Favorite Sayings Settings”.

Put Away...
 1.3.1

Put items in the trash or on the desktop back where they came from.  Also unmounts disks.  The Finder needs to be running to do a normal “put away”, but not to unmount a disk.

You can shift-click to make contiguous multiple selections, or command-click to make arbitrary multiple selections.  A double click on a list acts as a shortcut for a click on a list followed by a click on the OK button.

One of the two lists has an extra frame, indicating that it is the target of keyboard commands.  You can select an item using the up and down arrow keys, or by typing a few letters of a name.  You can scroll the list using the page up, page down, home, and end keys if your keyboard has those keys.  The tab key switches to the other list.

QuickAlias
 1.0.3

This external may be more convenient than “Make Alias As” if you will be making many aliases in the same place, as when you are setting up your Other menu or your Apple menu.  When you run this external, it displays a dialog showing a path to a folder.  If it is not the folder in which you want to create some aliases, click the “Set Folder” button and select a new folder.  As long as QuickAlias is running, any item that you select from the Other menu will be aliased into the chosen folder.  When an alias is created, a little sound is played to reassure you that something happened.

You might find it convenient to make several copies of QuickAlias, set to different folders.

QuickTrash
 1.1.1

This external can be used as an alternative to “Move to Trash” for trashing multiple items.  When the external is running, any item you select from the Other menu will be moved to the trash.  If you select an alias, then the alias will be moved rather than the original item, just as in the Finder.  When an item is trashed, a little sound is played to reassure you that something happened.

If you try to trash something when the trash already contains an item of the same name, QuickTrash may ask Finder for help.  So in this case if Finder is not running, it will not work, and if QuickTrash is running within Finder, then the action will not be completed until you dismiss QuickTrash.

Quit Finder
 1.2.2

Tells the Finder to quit.  If file sharing is turned on, it will be turned off just before Finder.

Actually, you can use this to make any other single application quit, by using its configuration dialog to specify the creator code of an application.  But you’d only do that for something you quit very often, since Memory Map would otherwise be a more convenient way to quit something.

Quote
 1.3.3

This external transforms text on the clipboard for BBS quoting.  The way you would use it is to copy some text to the clipboard, invoke the Quote external, and then paste, perhaps into a different application.  If you invoke Quote with the shift and option keys held down, you will be able to set various options:  Whether to break lines so that they are not too long, a prefix string to be added to the beginning of each line, and whether to replace curly quotes by straight quotes.

You might want to make several copies of Quote, with different settings.  If you turn on “Rewrap lines”, set the maximum line length to 0, and set the prefix string to the empty string, then Quote behaves almost exactly like Hard to Soft Wrap.  On the other hand, by specifying a positive maximum line length you can use Quote to hard-wrap text.

Speaker Volume
 1.1.2

Provides a submenu for setting the speaker volume.

Specialize
 1.0.1

This external can be used to make a file or folder appear on the menu only when a certain application is running in the foreground.  For example, let’s say that you want an alias to a certain ClarisWorks stationery file to appear in the menu only when ClarisWorks is in the foreground.  To accomplish this,
1. Bring ClarisWorks to the front.
2. Select the Specialize external.  In the resulting dialog, make sure that the Specialize radio button is chosen.
3. Choose the stationery alias in OtherMenu.
4. Click the Done button in the dialog.
If you change your mind and want the item to appear in the menu in every application, use the same steps except select the Generalize radio button.

Specialize works by appending a suffix to the name of the item.  For instance if “Externals Manual” is specialized to appear only in SimpleText, its name is changed to “Externals Manual<ttxt”.  This suffix will not be visible in OtherMenu, but will be visible in the Finder and other utilities. 

If you apply Specialize to the original document rather than an alias, then the name of the original document will be modified.

Volume Info
 1.3

Shows the icon, name, free space, capacity, and number of files on each mounted volume.

Windows
 2.1.1

Provides a submenu of windows in the current application.  Selecting one brings it to the front, not counting floating windows, unless the front window is a modal dialog.

If you invoke the external with the option key down, then it will use a stronger, more risky method to bring the selected window to the front.  This should only be used in unusual circumstances, such as when a misbehaving application will not let you dismiss a dialog.