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PowerSnap 2.1b User Manual Nov 22, 1992 PREFACE The programs and files in this distribution are freely distributable, but are also Copyright (c) Nico Francois. They may be freely distributed as long as no more than a nominal fee is charged to cover time and copying costs. No commercial usage is permitted without written permission from the author. Everything in this distribution must be kept together, in original unmodified form. The above is generally known as freeware. If you have suggestions or remarks about this program, or if you find any bugs, please let me know. Contacting the author: Fido: 2:292/603.10 (Nico Francois) UUCP: Nico.Francois@p10.f603.n292.z2.FidoNet.Org Mail: Nico François Corbielaan 13 B-3060 Bertem BELGIUM If you can please use e-mail. That way you'll stand a much better chance of getting a reply quickly. NOTE: PowerSnap 2.1b requires Kickstart and Workbench 2.0 or higher to run! 1. Introduction --------------- Snap, snap, snap, snap, eggs and snap :-) Ahem... (If you don't get this don't let it bother you if you think I've gone completely bananas :-) PowerSnap is a utility that allows you to use the mouse to mark characters anywhere on the screen and paste them somewhere else, like in the CLI or in a string gadget. PowerSnap will check what font is used in the window you snap from and will look for the position of the characters automatically. It recognizes all non proportional fonts of up to 24 pixels wide and of any height so this should cover most fonts used. Snapping and pasting text is done using the mouse, Page 1 making PowerSnap fast and easy to use. To try PowerSnap out, double-click its icon, move the mouse over a character on the screen, press the left Alt key and while keeping this pressed press the left mouse button. After a short delay (depends on how big the font is) PowerSnap will either flash the screen, indicating it hasn't found a character at this position (it is possible PowerSnap didn't look for the correct font), or the character you are pointing at will be selected. Move the mouse while keeping the left Alt key and the mouse button down to select more characters. Once you are satisfied with what you have selected release the left Alt key. You can now insert the text you have just snapped by pressing either left Alt + V or left Alt + right mouse button. Both the left Alt and the V keys mentioned in this short explanation are user-definable (see below). Also, don't start snapping on a space because PowerSnap will almost certainly get the character positions wrong. You CAN start snapping on a space if you have already snapped in the window. New to PowerSnap 2.1 is the ability to keep a history of snapped strings. You may select from this history to re-paste something. 2. Installation --------------- To install PowerSnap automatically use the installation script or install the handler manually by copying 'PowerSnap-handler' to your L: directory. 'PowerSnap-handler' does not have to be in L: but it is best if you put it there, PowerSnap will also find it if it is in the current directory. If you want PowerSnap to be part of your initial startup (so you always have the comfort of snapping anything anywhere :-) you should put a simple line saying 'PowerSnap' in your 's:user-startup'. If you wish to specify options include these on the same line, like for example 'PowerSnap SMARTSPACE COLOR 2'. To disable the copyright message redirect output to NIL: like in 'PowerSnap >NIL:'. Workbench 2.0 users have the following extra possibility: drag the PowerSnap icon into the WbStartup drawer of your boot disk/partition. And that's all there is to it. Specify options in the icon's tooltypes (you will want to set the tooltype 'CX_POPUP=NO'). In any case make sure PowerSnap is in your command path! 3. Usage -------- 3.1 From CLI or Shell Enter 'PowerSnap ?' for a CLI usage template, 'PowerSnap ??' for a more detailed usage report. Page 2 Explanation of the options: CX_PRIORITY n : Set priority of commodity (default: 0). CX_POPUP YES|NO: Set to NO to not open GUI window when PowerSnap is first installed (default: YES). CX_POPKEY desc : Standard description of hotkey to pop up GUI window (default: control lalt p). NOGUI : Don't open GUI settings window. QUAL qual : Set snap qualifier (default: lalt). This is the qualifier that must be down when you press the left mouse button to start snapping. This is also the qualifier for inserting the snapped text. There are two ways to insert snapped text: using the paste key or using the right mouse button. SLQUAL qual : Set single line paste qualifier (default: lalt+lshift). When this qualifier is down and you insert snapped text everything will be put on one single line. All whitespace (spaces and newlines) between words will be changed to a single space. Very useful for inserting a lot of filenames from a directory for example. MULTIQUAL qual : Set multisnap qualifier (default: lalt+lshift). When you start snapping with this qualifier the snapped text will be appended after what you snapped before. A newline will be placed in between the snapped texts, so they are all on their own line. Paste snapped text using the single line qualifier to get everything on one line. Note that the default single line qualifier and the multisnap qualifier are the same. You can still toggle multisnap on or off when you are already snapping. Just change the qualifier, so in the default setup let go or press down the shift key. There is a small delay of 1/8 sec before toggling the snap mode. This was done so it is less likely that you accidently snap in the wrong mode when you release all qualifiers to stop snapping. PASTEKEY c : Set pastekey (default: V). This key is used to insert the snapped text. Insertion will follow when it is pressed with one of the three possible qualifiers down (QUAL, SLQUAL, PAQUAL). SNAPCHARS : Start with character snap (default). SNAPFRAME : Start with frame snap. PowerSnap has two snap modes: character and frame. The easiest to explain is Page 3 frame snap, you just draw a rectangle and everything inside it will be snapped. Character snap will interpret the screen as lines of text (like an editor) and will snap accordingly. [NO]JOIN : Join mode on/off (default: JOIN). Tells PowerSnap if it's ok to join two lines to a single long line when the first line has a non blank character as its last character. This only works when you are using character, word or line snap. [NO]XEROX : Xerox insert mode on/off (default: NOXEROX). When xerox mode is on snapped text will be inserted immediately when you stop snapping. COLOR 1-3 : Set color of select box (default: 1). This sets the color of the complemented characters. Try all three and see what you like best. MULTICOLOR 1-3 : Set color of multisnap select box (default: 2). This sets the color of the complemented characters when doing a multisnap. It is best to set this to a different color than the normal snap color. This way you'll have an easy way to see when you are using multisnap. PAQUAL qual : Set pre-/append qualifier (default: lalt+ctrl). When using this qualifier to insert snapped text a string will be prepended to each line and one will be appended. PREPEND str : Set prepend string (default: "> "). Use this to set the string that will be prepended when you paste with the PAQUAL down. This string can be up to 16 characters long. To enter a '"' in the string escape it with a '*'. E.g. 'PowerSnap PREPEND " *" "'. APPEND str : Set append string (default: ""). Use this to set the string that will be appended when you paste with the PAQUAL down. Can be up to 16 characters. [NO]SMARTSPACE : If you do a word snap PowerSnap will normally guess at the boundaries of the word by simply looking for empty chars. If you switch SMARTSPACE on however PowerSnap will really try to recognize the characters and stop at spaces as well as unknown characters. This way you will no longer snap part of the 'scenery' when doing a word snap. Only drawback is that it is a bit slower, so it is disabled by default. If you have a faster Amiga (like the A3000) it is strongly recommended to switch this option on. If you don't exactly understand what I mean try Page 4 snapping the contents of a qualifier text gadget in PowerSnap's settings window with SMARTSPACE switched on and off. [NO]ALLFONTS : If you switch ALLFONTS on PowerSnap will try all open fonts in memory when it is looking for characters. This will make the initial snap much slower (depending on how many fonts are open and how fast your Amiga is of course). Once a specific font is recognized it is remembered and will be tried first next time you snap. So if you snap the same font several times you won't have the delay each time you snap. The default behaviour is to just consider the window's rastport font. Recognition of the window's rastport font is _not_ slower with ALLFONTS on. So with ALLFONTS off you won't recognize a non-rastport font, and with ALLFONTS on you will, but more slowly. HISTORY n : Set number of lines in history buffer. PowerSnap will remember the last n snaps. Pressing Left Alt-H (or whatever you defined to be the history key) will bring up a window with a listview containing these last snaps. Selecting an entry from the listview will copy the entry to the clipboard so you can paste it again. The history window is keyboard controllable: you may use the up and down arrow keys to select an entry. Press Enter or Return to copy the selected entry to the clipboard, press Esc to cancel. Default is 0, so no history. HISTORYKEY c : Set the history key (default: H). Pressing this key together with the snap qualifier will pop up the history window. The history window will appear on the active screen. A safety has been built into PowerSnap to remove this window if the screen it is on closes. CHARDELAY n : Set character paste delay in microseconds (default: 1). Some programs have problems if text is pasted to quickly. Using CHARDELAY you can tell PowerSnap to add a delay between pasting characters. The delay is specified in microseconds (1 sec = 1000). I doubt you will have to set this higher than 20. LINEDELAY n : Set line paste delay in microseconds (default: 1). Same as CHARDELAY, but this delay will be added between pasting lines (after pasting a newline). Following qualifiers are recognized: Page 5 lshift Left shift key rshift Right shift key ctrl Control key control Control key lalt Left alt key ralt Right alt key lamiga Left Amiga key lcommand Left Amiga key ramiga Right Amiga key rcommand Right Amiga key midbutton Middle mouse button (if you have one :-) Or any combination of these (separate the qualifiers by a non-alpha character like a '+', '-' or '|'), e.g. 'lalt+lshift' or 'lalt-lshift'. You may run PowerSnap again once it has been installed to change the settings. 'PowerSnap QUIT' will remove the handler from memory. Examples: o PowerSnap PREPEND "Type " APPEND " OPT N" When you paste some text 'Type ' will be inserted before each line and ' OPT N' after. If you e.g. snap 'PowerSnap.c' and press left Alt Ctrl V the following will be inserted: 'Type PowerSnap.c OPT N' o PowerSnap QUAL lshift+rshift+ctrl This sets the snap qualifier to both Shift keys plus the Ctrl key. This is a rather silly example because unless your name is Zaphod Beeblebrox or you are very good at doing things with your feet it is quite impossible to snap anything with this qualifier :^) o PowerSnap PASTEKEY i Sets the paste key to 'I' instead of 'V'. So pressing left Alt I will feed the text in the clipboard to the keyboard. NOTE: - You can toggle between character/frame snap once you have started snapping. Just keep the left mouse pressed down while you click the right one. Be careful, if you don't keep the left button pressed you will insert the text you have marked. - PowerSnap has the ability to do word oriented snapping. To activate this double-click the left mouse button when you start snapping. Note that word snapping forces character snapping and frame snapping is no longer possible. See SMARTSPACE on how to improve word snapping. Tripple-clicking the left mouse button will put PowerSnap in line-snap mode, this allows you to easily snap whole lines of text. Page 6 - Press the left mouse button while PowerSnap is inserting to abort. Page 7 3.2 From Workbench PowerSnap recognizes the following tooltypes (see CLI/Shell options for a more complete explanation): CX_PRIORITY=n : Priority of commodity (default is 0). CX_POPUP=YES|NO: Set to NO to not open GUI window when PowerSnap is first installed. Set this tooltype to NO if you drag PowerSnap into your WbStartup drawer for a quiet startup (default: YES). CX_POPKEY=desc : Standard description of hotkey to pop up GUI window (default: control lalt p). QUAL=qual : Snap qualifier (default: lalt). SLQUAL=qual : Single line qualifier (default: lalt+lshift). MULTIQUAL=qual : multisnap qualifier (default: lalt+lshift). PASTEKEY=c : Pastekey (default: V). SNAPFRAME : Start with frame snap. COLOR=1-3 : Color of select box (default: 1). MULTICOLOR=1-3 : Color of multisnap select box (default: 2). NOJOIN : Join mode off. XEROX : Xerox insert mode on. PAQUAL=qual : Pre-/append qualifier (default: lalt+ctrl). PREPEND=str : Prepend string (default: "> "). APPEND=str : Append string (default: ""). Do *NOT* put quotes around the pre-/append string. SMARTSPACE : Switch SMARTSPACE on for improved word snapping. ALLFONTS : Switch ALLFONTS on to try all open fonts in memory. HISTORY=n : Set number of lines in history buffer (default: 0). HISTORYKEY=c : Set history key (default: H). CHARDELAY=n : Set character paste delay in microseconds (default: 1). LINEDELAY=n : Set line paste delay in microseconds (default: 1). Select PowerSnap's icon and choose 'Information' from the 'Icons' menu. You can now edit PowerSnap's tooltypes, check your Workbench manual for more information. The provided PowerSnap icon has the following tooltypes already set: 'SMARTSPACE' and 'ALLFONTS'. So edit the icon's tooltypes if you want to change these. All other tooltypes are also listed in brackets. The brackets are used to 'comment out' a tooltype, so remove them if you want to use the tooltype. Running PowerSnap twice will bring up the settings window. Select 'Quit' from this window's 'Project' menu to remove PowerSnap. You can of course use the system's Commodities Exchange program to kill PowerSnap. Page 8 4. Settings Window ------------------ When you start PowerSnap you will be presented with a window where you can change all of PowerSnap's settings. You may open this window at any time by using PowerSnap's hotkey (control lalt p, or whatever you set using CX_POPKEY) or by using the standard Commodities Exchange program. Everything in this window should be fairly self-explanatory. The window has a project menu with two items: Hide and Quit. Selecting Hide is the same as using the window's close gadget, selecting Quit will remove PowerSnap from the system. Most changes you make will be effective immediately, so you can try them out at once. The qualifiers will only be changed once you close the window used to set them. Note that the code for this window is located in the PowerSnap program, not in PowerSnap-handler. The window code will only be loaded when actually needed, so PowerSnap will use a minimum of memory when hidden. 5. Features ----------- o Fully supports the clipboard.device. You can use snapped text in all other programs that supports the clipboard.device. o Snaps all printable characters, from ' ' (32) to 'ÿ' (255). o Supports all keymaps. o Uses a relatively small handler that is about 11K long. PowerSnap uses about 20K of memory once it is installed (excluding memory used by the clipboard.device and commodities.library). o Recognizes all non-proportional fonts to up to 24 pixels wide and of any height. Also recognizes scaled fonts (bitmap and IntelliFonts). o Recognizes plain, underlined, bold, inverse, bold underlined, inverse underlined, inverse bold and inverse bold underlined characters :-) o Works with fonts with kerning data (like the courier.font supplied with Workbench 2.0). o Will remember character positions in up to 8 windows. Once you have snapped in a window the initial character position will be found immediately and you may also start snapping on spaces. Page 9 o Joins long lines. o Pre-/appends strings to pasted text. o Has a single-line mode to paste all snapped text onto a single line. Whitespace and newlines will be changed to spaces. o Supports a middle mouse button if one exists. Using the middle button as qualifier gives the possibility to snap/paste without touching the keyboard! o Inputhandler is written in assembly for lowest possible overhead. New features for PowerSnap 2.0 & 2.1: ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ o Has a full intuition/gadtools interface to allow you to change all settings using the mouse. The window code is loaded from disk when needed for minimum memory usage. o PowerSnap is a standard commodity. Use the standard Commodities Exchange program to enable/disable it, kill it or to show/hide the settings window. o Multisnap feature. Allows you to snap something and add it to what you snapped before. This append-snapping is very useful to pick up several words that you might want to join into one long snap. The snapped items are put in the clipboard, each on its own line (with a linefeed between them). You can use the single-line paste to paste them all onto one line. o Recognizes text in all colors. Text in any color on a background of any color will be recognized. o SMARTSPACE feature to make PowerSnap consider unknown stuff as a space. This way you can do _much_ better word snapping in non-shell windows. o Can be told to try and recognize text in all open fonts in memory. PowerSnap will then recognize _all_ non-proportional fonts (up to 24 pixels wide) also if the font is not set in the window's rastport. o Keeps an optional history of snapped text. PowerSnap can remember up to 99 strings you snap. Pressing the history key will cause a history window to pop up and will allow you to select a string to be re-pasted. As always, enjoy! Page 10 PROGRAM HISTORY ********************************************************************** VERSION 1.0 o First release. ********************************************************************** VERSION 1.1 o Fixed bug in reading from clipboard. Strange things could happen if the clipboard did not contain text. Unknown clips are properly ignored now. Incompatibility with 'ConClip' (Workbench 2.0, V37) resolved. Default COLOR changed to 1. Version string embedded for Workbench 2.0 'Version' command. o To put the record straight: PowerSnap is not a modified version of Snap (by Mikael Karlsson). It is a completely different program that does most of the things Snap does. A lot of the features and ideas in PowerSnap were influenced by (read: stolen from :-) Snap though. I just thought I'd mention this because some German magazine almost convicted me for plagiarism, oh boy :^D I wrote PowerSnap because I was not happy with Snap taking up over 80K of my precious memory (PowerSnap only uses about 12K). o The Amiga would hang if you tried to snap something just when a window was about to close. Now all the Intuition functions that open, close or modify windows are patched so they will wait until snapping has finished. If you are running Kickstart 2.0, the new Intuition functions are also patched. This should fix all deadlocks. o New tooltype 'QUIET' added for startup from Workbench without window. o Tested with Enforcer and Mungwall debugging tools. ********************************************************************** VERSION 2.0 ** ONLY RUNS ON KICKSTART 2.0 OR HIGHER! ** o PowerSnap is a commodity now, so it can be disabled/enabled and killed using the Commodities Exchange program. Note the replacement of the 'PRIORITY' argument by 'CX_PRIORITY' to set the commodity's priority rather than that of the input handler (default is 0). o Now has a hotkey to pop up a GUI window to set the settings. This window allows you to easily change all of PowerSnap's settings with the mouse. Note that the QUIET tooltype has been removed. Use CX_POPUP=NO now. o Fixed bug: no longer crashes on fonts with LoChar smaller than 32. o PowerSnap's character recognition has been improved. Before you could only snap black or blue text, now you may also snap white text. In fact PowerSnap now recognizes text in any color on a background of any color. How could you ever manage without this :) Page 11 o New SMARTSPACE and NOSMARTSPACE arguments. Allows you to switch on much better, but slower, word-snap detection. Once you get used to this I think you won't mind it's a bit slower. It is no problem on faster Amigas of course, like the A3000. o New multisnap feature: allows you to add what you snap now to what you snapped before. That way you can e.g. snap several files from a directory without having to snap them all at once. o PowerSnap will now optionally consider every font currently open instead of just the window's rastport font. ALLFONTS and NOALLFONTS arguments. o Will abort the snap if you release the snap qualifier before the recognition routine has finished. o Allows you to use lamiga, ramiga and ctrl to specify qualifiers. ********************************************************************** VERSION 2.0a o Error reporting much improved. If handler fails to initialize you will be informed of the problem (instead of just flashing the display). o Fixed bug: if handler failed to initialize the settings window would appear and would allow you to change settings that weren't there :-) o Settings window changed to a simple refresh window. Refreshing is a bit slower, but when the window is covered a lot of chip memory is saved (especially on screens with a lot of colors/bitplanes). o The handler will now complain if it can't find PowerSnap in the command path. ********************************************************************** VERSION 2.1 o PowerSnap now (optionally) keeps a history list of all snapped text. It is possible to pick a string from this history list to be re-snapped. Pressing Left Alt-H (or another key you may choose) will bring up a window on the currently active screen containing the snap history. This window will be automatically closed if the screen it is on closes. o Somebody reported he had a problem when using QMouse (with the sunmouse feature) and PowerSnap together. I have changed the way PowerSnap patches the window functions of Intuition. If a program tries to use an Intuition window function snapping will now be aborted. This should fix all deadlock problems. o Using the middle mouse button qualifier didn't work. Fixed. Now you can finally snap and paste without using the keyboard. o On Kickstart 3.0 the wait pointer in the settings window is set to the standard Intuition wait pointer. o Two new switches: CHARDELAY and LINEDELAY. Allow you to set an optional delay when pasting characters and lines (in milliseconds). Default delay is set to 1 microsecond (ok for most programs). MEmacs (in your Workbench's Tools drawer seems to require a character delay of 5). Page 12 o Recognition of underscore character improved. PowerSnap will try to be smart about figuring out wether a character is an underscore or an underlined space. o PowerSnap will check the version of PowerSnap-handler. This will take care of the problem of an old handler still being installed and causing weird things to happen. o Amazingly stupid bug fixed :) Seems V37 of commodities library doesn't understand the 'ctrl' qualifier (only 'control'). This caused the default popup key not to work on Workbench 2.0. On Workbench 2.1 or 3.0 all worked perfectly. Default popup key has been changed to 'control lalt p'. ********************************************************************** VERSION 2.1a o New feature: line snapping. Tripple clicking the mouse button will put PowerSnap in line snap mode. This allows you to easily snap whole lines of text from a window. Clicking again will bring you back to character/frame snapping. o New feature: trailing spaces will be automatically stripped from each line of snapped text. Spaces will not be stripped from the last line of text if you are in character snap mode. o Now refuses to quit when some other program has patched intuition.library. Previous versions would blindly unpatch intuition.library causing all sorts of strange and wonderful crashes :-) o PowerSnap will now generate both key-down _and_ key-up events. Previously only a key-down event was sent to the input.device, confusing some programs. o Bug fix: PASTEKEY and HISTORYKEY arguments didn't work and caused enforcer hits. Fixed. o Bug fix: fixed enforcer hit that occured when settings window was popped up (using Commodities Exchange or popup key). ********************************************************************** VERSION 2.1b o Bug fix: inputevents are now properly cleared before filling them in and sending them to the input.device. This should fix problems with corrupted pastes a small percentage of users was encountering. o History window made keyboard controllable. Use the up/down arrow keys to select an entry. Press Return or Enter to accept, Esc to cancel. Will look best on Kickstart 3.0 because the listview gadget uses a highlight box to show which item is selected, on 2.0 a text gadget is used. o Word snapping improved. You may now start word snapping on a space. The space will be included in the snap. Request from Roger Nordin (or 'a major problem' as he calls it). I hope this makes Roger happy :^) Page 13 o Fixed the annoying 'DisplayBeep() not going away until I stop snapping' problem :-) Thanks to Roger Nordin for bugging me about this. This bug(?) has been in PowerSnap from the day it was released but I never bothered to fix it. o Changed some code to use Kickstart 3.0 bitmap/rastport functions if possible. This should improve future compatibility. ********************************************************************** PowerSnap 2.1b by Nico François (Yes, Nico is my first name :-) thanks to Jorrit Tyberghein, Ives Aerts, Philip Marivoet, Kenny Grant and Herman Stevens for beta testing. Copyright (c) 1991/1992 Nico François // Thanks to \X/ Amiga for being the best computer ever! Page 14 Table Of Contents PowerSnap 2.1b PREFACE......................................................... 1 1. Introduction................................................. 1 2. Installation................................................. 2 3. Usage........................................................ 2 3.1 From CLI or Shell........................................ 2 3.2 From Workbench........................................... 8 4. Settings Window.............................................. 9 5. Features..................................................... 9 PROGRAM HISTORY................................................. 11