PD Utilities

Following Paulo’s comment in the ! thread, it has occurred to me that there’s a lot of free utilities out there whose functionality probably ought to find their way into the OS. Perhaps someone could collate a list of the most likely ones?

• DoubleTake: double-click-and-hold simulates shift-double-click
• MoveWindow: bring windows to front & move without seeing title bar
• FullNames: expands long names in filer windows

• SmartOpenDir: different directories keep different view settings
• WinSnap: snap windows to screen edges
• Memphis2: re-sizable replacement for the ram disc

Any thoughts?

Adam

• Memphis2: re-sizable replacement for the ram disc

I presume you mean Memphis3, available from http://www.richardspencer.freeuk.com/memphis3/ - which is far superior to earlier versions.

Any thoughts?

Perhaps the following could be added:

• DeepKeys: Improves use of keys+modifiers within the wimp,bundled with zap
• LineEditor: Adds memory to cli text input, bundled with zap
• PBFront: Brings PinBoard to the front on a keypress – nice program but has ugly feature of needing tailored versions for different operating system versions

DeepKeys: Improves use of keys+modifiers within the wimp,bundled with zap

Seconded. The missing support for modifier keys in RISC OS has been bugging me for a long time. If this gets in I’ll happily rewrite StrongED to advantage of it.

PBFront: Brings PinBoard to the front on a keypress – nice program but has ugly feature of needing tailored versions for different operating system versions

If this is added then I’d prefer it to be done in the same way as in Select, assuming ROL will allow this. That way we’d have a single message to front the Pinboard.

BTW PBFront doesn’t have to be two modules, John Duffell decided to do it this way. In my personal copy I’ve combined them in a single module that works on RO4, Select and RO5.

Thirded with DeepKeys. I’m not sure if that particular API is what I’d choose personally, but something like that needs adding. It was actually something I was considering for a software port, at one stage, while gainfully employed; circumstances overtook the idea sadly.

While something like deep keys would be good, can I add a few requests: Using DeepKeys, you get the low-level internal key code, modifier flags and the Wimp key code. I would add the inkey value (as testing these is a little more international-friendly than testing the keyv codes, I hope – though maybe adding some sort of ‘keysym’ like table to the keyboard handler might be an idea). I would also pass the ‘uninflected’ wimp key code (ignoring all modifiers, including Alt).

These changes would make writing tasks which need access to slightly lower level keyboard data easier, remote desktop programs or emulators inparticular. Presumably, the wimp version could be used to detect the presense of extra fields?

When a new version of the OS comes up my first personalization is to change the Filer menu “Delete” option to red. I find this makes it easier to avoid accidental deletions. Unfortunately the filer menu colours are hard-coded into the Filer module, so a patched module has to be softloaded. It would be so much easier if the menu colours were loaded from Resources:$.Resources.Filer.Messages. I am sure this would not be a difficult change.

Resurrecting an old thread.

Has anyone ever looked at the KeyWatch module, that’s amongst the sources, as a possible alternative for the DeepKeys module?

I don’t really know anything about DeepKeys or KeyWatch, so I can’t comment on those.

But I do agree with James that a keyboard remapping utility is a must (especially for devices with tiny keyboards, e.g. Pandora), and will put forward two additional ideas: Integrate my utility Absolutely, and add a new OS_Module reason code to read the version number of a module (using whatever magic algorithm RMEnsure does). This SWI should also be implemented by CallASWI so that code doesn’t have to fall back to more archaic methods if the version check SWI isn’t built into the OS itself.

At a complete guess based on zero experience, I believe the module title and version in the help string are separated by a tab character.

Presumably it is assumed to terminate with a space.