~04/1995
Become A Power User ! RISC OS provides a number of shortcuts which make performing many tasks easier and quicker. RISC OS 3 has introduced additional new features which improve the situation still further. To see the effects to best advantage, why not try them out as you read this? The Adjust Button The Adjust button is generally used to provide some option which behaves like the action produced by clicking Select, but is subtly different in some way. Alternatively it may provide a short cut to a dialogue window. The one thing it should never do is exactly duplicate the action of Select. Some of these facilities are provided within RISC OS, while others rely upon the author of an application to implement them in a standard manner. The action of the mouse buttons, and many other issues relating to the user interface, is covered in the RISC OS Style Guide (product code AKJ18). * The usual method of dragging a window is use the Select button on the title bar. This brings the window to the front as well, which can sometimes disrupt a layout of windows which has taken some time to build up. However, if Adjust is used, the window can be dragged, but will retain it's position in the stack of windows. * To move the work area of a window you may either drag the scroll bar, or click Select on the up/down/left/right arrows (if provided on that window). Clicking Adjust on one of these arrows moves in the opposite directions to Select, which saves having to move to the opposite arrow if you overshoot whilst scrolling a window. * The idea of Adjust performing the opposite of Select also appears in some dialogue boxes (eg the zoom setting in !Draw). Clicking Select will increment a value, but clicking Adjust will decrement it. Again, this helps to reduce mouse movement. * Clicking Adjust on the close box of a filer window will open the parent directory for the one which you closed. Some editors also support this - ie Adjust on the close box of an editor window will open the directory viewer containing the file which was being edited. Continued next month... Pound Signs and PC Emulators Some users have been unable to get the £ sign under the PC Emulator. This is due to there not being a £ key on a US layout PC keyboard. You can get reprogram the # key to produce the £ by adding: To AUTOEXEC.BAT - @ECHO ON PROMPT $e[35;156p CLS @ECHO OFF To CONFIG.SYS - DEVICE = ANSI.SYS Did you know ... ? If you drag a file/directory or application in to a RISC OS 3 !Edit window with the SHIFT key held down the name of the object is inserted. This can make building boot files much quicker! This also works with !SrcEdit which is supplied with Desktop C/Assembler. Programs which were written in C (including !Edit, !Draw and !Paint) have keyboard shortcuts available when a dialogue box is being displayed. Pressing F1 reacts like clicking the first icon (icon 0), F2 for the second (icon 1) and so on. In addition, if a letter key is pressed an attempt will be made to match it against a capital letter in a field. Thus, using !Edit's Find window as an example you can repeat the last search by pressing F4 F2 F1. Similarly when a match has been found you could use C or F2 to Continue, R or F3 to Replace and so on. Note that this may not work where the input focus is also within the window.