From: Ismo J. Makinen (ism@sci.fi)
Date: Fri Mar 22 2002 - 10:25:56 EST
Hot tip of the day! Customize your default status bar
This is great news! This is no scam!
As a responsible translator of the Finnish
AbiWord I was quite concern when I noticed
that I couldn't translate the word "default"
which sits on the status bar. This is very
irritating because it is almost the only string
which defies translation. I couldn't find a way
to translate it. Strings.en-us didn't have a
corresponding string.
Then I thought of the mysterious AbiWord.Profile.
I know I shouldn't touch it by hand, at least with
AbiWord, but as I said before, I was desperate.
I was hilarious when I found my string,
KeyBindings="default". I decided to scheme a little.
I had heard that this mysterious default has something
to do with keyboard emulation. I also knew that
AbiWord has a rudimentary emacs and vi support.
I copied the string to a scheme named _custom_
and changed the value to KeyBindings="emacs".
I quickly changed the file and started AbiWord.
It worked! I had now a pretty emacs string. Of course
I didn't remember very well the emacs key bindings.
As a windows user I use more sensible bindings ;)
Luckily for many years ago I had basic course on Unix
and some emacs (and vi). I remembered that Ctrl-E
goes to the end of line and Ctrl-P is previous line,
not print. Not very exiting but it worked! I also tried the
escape key, I thought that escape-F and so on should work
and I would move by word. Maybe my memory was
corrupted or that wasn't the correct meta-character.
Of course I remembered the most important emacs
command ever, Ctrl-X Ctrl-C and quit promptly.
Next I tried to use vi keybindins. I wasn't very happy
about it. Almost the only thing I remembered of it
was that it was a horrible, horrible program. Almost
as bad as edlin was in ms dos. I changed
KeyBindings="vi". I wasn't quite sure of this syntax.
It is very hard to find information of the correct
parameter values. Maybe because you are not
encouraged to change them.
I started AbiWord. I had now vi sitting on my status bar.
I wrote some text and tried escape :q. and other
escape combinations. Maybe it was my memory again.
Nothing seemed to work. I thought my value was
wrong. I dimly remembered as an avid reader of
the mail-list that it might be something like
vi-keys. I changed the value, status bar responded
correspondingly, but the results were the same as
before.
Then I thought: how is it that I can write non-working
values which I can see on the status bar. I tried to
experiment a little. I wrote KeyBindings="ISMO".
It Worked. Now I had my pretty first name on the
status bar. I had personalized my AbiWord!
I quickly noticed that it doesn't matter what you write.
I tried KeyBindings="Abiword Rulez". I tried also
"I LOVE ABI". "I LOVE ABIWORD" was too
long string. Maybe we should extend the area?
Think about it. You can write to the status bar.
I am not suggesting we should add something
like scrolling text or something like it.
This is still pretty neat! Maybe installer could ask
our name or company name and write it to
the .profile or we could have a separate dialogue
for this string.
Maybe we could also sell this space for
marketing purposes ;) The choices are endless.
If I just knew how to add the heart symbol!
Also 8-bit characters didn't seem to work.
I (insert heart symbol here) love Abi.
PS. I am sorry if went 'little' overboard.
I think I was just too excited of this
new usage I discovered. I still think the string
'default' doesn't tell anything to your default
user. Better would be to leave it empty when
it isn't 'emacs' or 'vi' keybindings. Even MS Word
doesn't use it. Of course that isn't very heavy
argument ;)
-- Ismo Mäkinen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Mar 22 2002 - 10:24:08 EST