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editres - a dynamic resource editor for X
Toolkit applications
editres [ -toolkitoption ... ]
Editres accepts
all of the standard X Toolkit command line options (see X(7)
). The order
of the command line options is not important.
Editres is a tool
that allows users and application developers to view the full widget hierarchy
of any X Toolkit application that speaks the Editres protocol. In addition,
editres will help the user construct resource specifications, allow the
user to apply the resource to the application and view the results dynamically.
Once the user is happy with a resource specification editres will append
the resource string to the user's X Resources file.
Editres
provides a window consisting of the following four areas:
- Menu Bar
- A set
of popup menus that allow you full access to editres's features.
- Panner
- The
panner allows a more intuitive way to scroll the application tree display.
- Message Area
- Displays information to the user about the action that editres
expects of her.
- Application Widget Tree
- This area will be used to display
the selected application's widget tree.
To begin an editres session select
the Get Widget Tree menu item from the command menu. This will change the
pointer cursor to cross hair. You should now select the application you
wish look at by clicking on any of its windows. If this application understands
the editres protocol then editres will display the application's widget
tree in its tree window. If the application does not understand the editres
protocol editres will inform you of this fact in the message area after
a few seconds delay.
Once you have a widget tree you may now select any
of the other menu options. The effect of each of these is described below.
- Get Widget Tree
- Allows the user to click on any application that
speaks the editres protocol and receive its widget tree.
- Refresh Current
Widget Tree
- Editres only knows about the widgets that exist at the present
time. Many applications create and destroy widgets on the fly. Selecting
this menu item will cause editres to ask the application to resend its
widget tree, thus updating its information to the new state of the application.
- For example,
- xman only creates the widgets for its topbox when it starts
up. None of the widgets for the manual page window are created until the
user actually clicks on the Manual Page button. If you retrieved xman's
widget tree before the the manual page is active, you may wish to refresh
the widget tree after the manual page has been displayed. This will allow
you to also edit the manual page's resources.
- Dump Widget Tree to a File
- For
documenting applications it is often useful to be able to dump the entire
application widget tree to an ASCII file. This file can then be included
in the manual page. When this menu item is selected a popup dialog is activated.
Type the name of the file in this dialog, and either select okay, or type
a carriage-return. Editres will now dump the widget tree to this file. To
cancel the file dialog, select the cancel button.
- Show Resource Box
- This
command will popup a resource box for the current application. This resource
box (described in detail below) will allow the user to see exactly which
resources can be set for the widget that is currently selected in the widget
tree display. Only one widget may be currently selected; if greater or
fewer are selected editres will refuse to pop up the resource box and put
an error message in the Message Area.
- Set Resource
- This command will popup
a simple dialog box for setting an arbitrary resource on all selected widgets.
You must type in the resource name, as well as the value. You can use
the Tab key to switch between the resource name field the resource value
field.
- Quit
- Exits editres.
The Tree menu contains several commands
that allow operations to be performed on the widget tree.
- Select Widget
in Client
- This menu item allows you to select any widget in the application;
editres will then highlight the corresponding element the widget tree display.
Once this menu item is selected the pointer cursor will again turn to a
crosshair, and you must click any pointer button in the widget you wish
to have displayed. Since some widgets are fully obscured by their children,
it is not possible to get to every widget this way, but this mechanism
does give very useful feedback between the elements in the widget tree
and those in the actual application.
- Select All
- Unselect All
- Invert All
- These functions allow the user to select, unselect, or invert
all widgets in the widget tree.
- Select Children
- Select Parents
- These functions select the immediate parent or children
of each of the currently selected widgets.
- Select Descendants
- Select Ancestors
- These functions select all parents or children of each
of the currently selected widgets. This is a recursive search.
- Show Widget
Names
- Show Class Names
- Show Widget Windows
- When the tree widget is initially displayed the labels
of each widget in the tree correspond to the widget names. These functions
will cause the label of all widgets in the tree to be changed to show the
class name, IDs, or window associated with each widget in the application.
The widget IDs, and windows are shown as hex numbers.
In addition there
are keyboard accelerators for each of the Tree operations. If the input
focus is over an individual widget in the tree, then that operation will
only effect that widget. If the input focus is in the Tree background it
will have exactly the same effect as the corresponding menu item.
The
translation entries shown may be applied to any widget in the application.
If that widget is a child of the Tree widget, then it will only affect
that widget, otherwise it will have the same effect as the commands in
the tree menu.
- Flash Active Widgets
- This command is the inverse of the Select
Widget in Client command, it will show the user each widget that is currently
selected in the widget tree, by flashing the corresponding widget in the
application numFlashes (three by default) times in the flashColor.
Key Option Translation Entry
space Unselect Select(nothing)
w Select Select(widget)
s Select Select(all)
i Invert Select(invert)
c Select Children Select(children)
d Select Descendants Select(descendants)
p Select Parent Select(parent)
a Select Ancestors Select(ancestors)
N Show Widget Names Relabel(name)
C Show Class Names Relabel(class)
I Show Widget IDs Relabel(id)
W Show Widget Windows Relabel(window)
T Toggle Widget/Class Name Relabel(toggle)
Clicking button 1 on a widget adds it to the set of selected widgets. Clicking
button 2 on a widget deselects all other widgets and then selects just
that widget. Clicking button 3 on a widget toggles its label between the
widget's instance name the widget's class name.
The
resource box contains five different areas. Each of the areas, as they
appear on the screen, from top to bottom will be discussed.
- The Resource
Line
- This area at the top of the resource box shows the current resource
name exactly as it would appear if you were to save it to a file or apply
it.
- The Widget Names and Classes
- This area allows you to select exactly which
widgets this resource will apply to. The area contains four lines, the
first contains the name of the selected widget and all its ancestors,
and the more restrictive dot (.) separator. The second line contains less
specific the Class names of each widget, and well as the less restrictive
star (*) separator. The third line contains a set of special buttons called
Any Widget which will generalize this level to match any widget. The last
line contains a set of special buttons called Any Widget Chain which will
turn the single level into something that matches zero or more levels.
- The
initial state of this area is the most restrictive, using the
- resource
names and the dot separator. By selecting the other buttons in this area
you can ease the restrictions to allow more and more widgets to match the
specification. The extreme case is to select all the Any Widget Chain
buttons, which will match every widget in the application. As you select
different buttons the tree display will update to show you exactly which
widgets will be effected by the current resource specification.
- Normal and
Constraint Resources
- The next area allows you to select the name of the
normal or constraint resources you wish to set. Some widgets may not have
constraint resources, so that area will not appear.
- Resource Value
- This next
area allows you to enter the resource value. This value should be entered
exactly as you would type a line into your resource file. Thus it should
contain no unescaped new-lines. There are a few special character sequences
for this file:
- \n - This will be replaced with a newline.
\### - Where # is any octal digit. This will be replaced with a single byte
that contains this sequence interpreted as an octal number. For example,
a value containing a NULL byte can be stored by specifying \000.
\<new-line> - This will compress to nothing.
\\ - This will compress to a single backslash.
- Command Area
- This area contains
several command buttons, described in this section.
- Set Save File
- This button
allows the user to modify file that the resources will be saved to. This
button will bring up a dialog box that will ask you for a filename; once
the filename has been entered, either hit carriage-return or click on the
okay button. To pop down the dialog box without changing the save file,
click the cancel button.
- Save
- This button will append the resource line described
above to the end of the current save file. If no save file has been set
the Set Save File dialog box will be popped up to prompt the user for a
filename.
- Apply
- This button attempts to perform a XtSetValues call on all
widgets that match the resource line described above. The value specified
is applied directly to all matching widgets. This behavior is an attempt
to give a dynamic feel to the resource editor. Since this feature allows
users to put an application in states it may not be willing to handle,
a hook has been provided to allow specific applications to block these
SetValues requests (see Blocking Editres Requests below).
- Unfortunately
due to design constraints imposed on the widgets by the X
- Toolkit and the
Resource Manager, trying to coerce an inherently static system into dynamic
behavior can cause strange results. There is no guarantee that the results
of an apply will be the same as what will happen when you save the value
and restart the application. This functionality is provided to try to give
you a rough feel for what your changes will accomplish, and the results
obtained should be considered suspect at best. Having said that, this is
one of the neatest features of editres, and I strongly suggest that you
play with it, and see what it can do.
- Save and Apply
- This button combines
the Save and Apply actions described above into one button.
- Popdown Resource
Box
- This button will remove the resource box from the display.
The editres protocol has been built into the Athena Widget set.
This allows all applications that are linked against Xaw to be able to
speak to the resource editor. While this provides great flexibility, and
is a useful tool, it can quite easily be abused. It is therefore possible
for any Xaw application to specify a value for the editresBlock resource
described below, to keep editres from divulging information about its internals,
or to disable the SetValues part of the protocol.
- editresBlock (Class EditresBlock)
- Specifies which type of blocking this application wishes to impose on the
editres protocol.
The accepted values are:
- all
- Block all requests.
- setValues
- Block
all SetValues requests. As this is the only editres request that actually
modifies the application, this is in effect stating that the application
is read-only.
- none
- Allow all editres requests.
Remember that these resources
are set on any Xaw application, not editres. They allow individual applications
to keep all or some of the requests editres makes from ever succeeding.
Of course, editres is also an Xaw application, so it may also be viewed
and modified by editres (rather recursive, I know), these commands can
be blocked by setting the editresBlock resource on editres itself.
For
editres the available application resources are:
- numFlashes (Class NumFlashes)
- Specifies the number of times the widgets in the application will be flashed
when the Show Active Widgets command in invoked.
- flashTime (Class FlashTime)
- Amount of time between the flashes described above.
- flashColor (Class flashColor)
- Specifies the color used to flash application widgets. A bright color should
be used that will immediately draw your attention to the area being flashed,
such as red or yellow.
- saveResourcesFile (Class SaveResourcesFile)
- This
is the file the resource line will be append to when the Save button activated
in the resource box.
In order to specify resources, it is useful
to know the hierarchy of the widgets which compose editres. In the notation
below, indentation indicates hierarchical structure. The widget class name
is given first, followed by the widget instance name.
Editres editres
Paned paned
Box box
MenuButton commands
SimpleMenu menu
SmeBSB sendTree
SmeBSB refreshTree
SmeBSB dumpTreeToFile
SmeLine line
SmeBSB getResourceList
SmeLine line
SmeBSB quit
MenuButton treeCommands
SimpleMenu menu
SmeBSB showClientWidget
SmeBSB selectAll
SmeBSB unselectAll
SmeBSB invertAll
SmeLine line
SmeBSB selectChildren
SmeBSB selectParent
SmeBSB selectDescendants
SmeBSB selectAncestors
SmeLine line
SmeBSB showWidgetNames
SmeBSB showClassNames
SmeBSB showWidgetIDs
SmeBSB showWidgetWindows
SmeLine line
SmeBSB flashActiveWidgets
Paned hPane
Panner panner
Label userMessage
Grip grip
Porthole porthole
Tree tree
Toggle <name of widget in application>
.
.
.
TransientShell resourceBox
Paned pane
Label resourceLabel
Form namesAndClasses
Toggle dot
Toggle star
Toggle any
Toggle name
Toggle class
.
.
.
Label namesLabel
List namesList
Label constraintLabel
List constraintList
Form valueForm
Label valueLabel
Text valueText
Box commandBox
Command setFile
Command save
Command apply
Command saveAndApply
Command cancel
Grip grip
Grip grip
- DISPLAY
- to get the default host and display number.
- XENVIRONMENT
- to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources
stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.
- /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Editres
- specifies required resources
X(7)
, xrdb(1)
, Athena Widget Set
This
is a prototype, there are lots of nifty features I would love to add, but
I hope this will give you some ideas about what a resource editor can do.
Chris D. Peterson, formerly MIT X Consortium
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