source: trunk/athena/bin/xmore/README @ 6954

/*      This is the README file for the Xmore.   A Program for displaying
 *      files on an X display.
 *      It Contains: Information
 *      
 *      Created:        1/30/88
 *      Last changed:   1/30/88
 *      By:             Chris Peterson
 *      
 *      Copyright (c) 1988 Massachusetts Instute of Technology.
 *
 *      For further information on copyright and distribution 
 *      see the file notice.h
 */     

THANKS:

        Many Thanks go to Ralph Swick who put up with my complaining
about bugs and (mis)features, as well as helping me learn Xtk and Xlib
from scratch.  Win Treese should also be thanked for putting up with
endless general C questions.  I must not forget to mention Barry Shein
whose Xmore for X Version 10 got me to thinking out this.

ABOUT THE CODE:

        This program was written as a quick hack from code in Xman as
yet another example of application code that uses the Xtk, and thus it
has much the same programming style.  This program uses the Xtk as an
aid to the programmer and not as a means for allowing the user to make
major changes to his/her user interface.  This has been, and will
continue to be, a source of much religious flaming.  The reason that
this programmer chose this method is that it allows things like the
fonts to be changed without adversely affecting the layout of the
widgets.  Hopefully when the widget library grows there will be less
need to hard code this type of functionality into the widget itself.
For those of you who care, this may not be the "blessed" method of
using the Xtk, but it is a method, and one that I found quite useful.

        One last note, in many places you may wonder why I didn't use
a different widget, or a more compact method of coding.  There are two
reasons for this, one is that the widget may just not have been
avaliable and the other is that I may not have known about it, the
documentation on the Xtk in those early days was scarce or
nonexistent.  That is the price you pay for developing on a moving and
Imncomplete baseline.

ABOUT XMORE:

This program allows easy and quick viewing of a file without using up
an xterm to do it in.  It has its own on line help system and manual page.
Moving through the file is done with a scrollbar in the same method as xmh,
(why, because it is easy to code from the toolkit, and I have gotten used to
it).  There is currently no way to change files once xmore starts up, but
it would be easy to put it in.

INSTALLING XMORE:

The only system specific parameter is HELPFILE which should point to a
world readable copy of xmore.help file, wherever such things live on
your system.  Xmore has been tested on a VS2000 running 4.3BSD with
nfs linking against approximatly the X11R2 Xlib and Xtk as well as the
Athena widget set.  I didn't have a color machine, but tried not to
build monochrom dependencies into this code.  Building the code shoule be as
simple as editing the Makefile, to give it the correct information, then:

                make all
                make manual
                make install

Xmore assumes that usr/include/X has the correct toolkit file, not
usr/include/X11, if this is not the case with your system you will
have edit most of the files.

NOTES:

It would be nice if the following could be implemented, perhaps by stealing
some code from more.

1) Changing files once xmore has started.

2) searching.

3) input from stdin.

4) ???

                                                Chris Peterson     
                                                Project Athena     
                                                Systems Development

ArpaNet: kit@athena.mit.edu             
Phone: (617) 253 - 1326                 
USMail: MIT - Room E40-342C             
        77 Massachusetts Ave.           
        Cambridge, MA 02139