The latest snapshot of tkgoodstuff at merv.philosophy.lsa.umich.edu
has a bunch of new stuff. It's likely to have some problems, but it
works well in my use. Thanks for any testing & reports!
Mark
(tkgoodstuff is a fancy button bar utility.)
4.1b7: (unreleased)
There have been quite a few changes that are sure to introduce new
bugs. Please inform me of any troubles, providing as much
information as you can about your platform, your .tkgrc, etc.
- The latest tkgoodstuff and the latest CHANGES file is now
available at the web site.
- The GUI installation tool has been replaced by a GNU autoconf
thing ("./configure" then "make", then "make install"). Probably
there are still importabilities, so please let me know how it goes.
- The xpm and fvwm extensions are now wrapped into "libtkg", which
is compiled and installed automatically at tkgoodstuff installation
(this way you don't have to install, and I don't have to maintain,
as many packages). If someone wants to pull them apart and
maintain them individually, be my guest.
- If the Tcl installation doesn't support loadable libraries, we
make and use tkgwish. You can force this with
"configure --enable-tkgwish". (Worth a try if the C compilation
fails.)
- The panel (including main panel) and menu configurations are now
done with a point-and-click, drag-and-drop hierarchical list widget
with little icons to make you feel safe-and-secure. It's harder to
screw up your configuration or menu now (or it should be when the
bugs get ironed out).
- The image+text tkgbutton code is now done in C (and is part of
libtkg). This simplifies and speeds up various things.
- Dragging a (screenedge mode) main panel (by its border) to other
edges of the screen now works without restarting tkgoodstuff. If
you have used the defaults, the arrangement of icons, labels, etc,
changes to suit the new orientation.
- No more "Dismiss" buttons in panels produced by PanelButtons,
since they can be dismissed by clicking on the PanelButton.
- Clock now shows time only by default, and toggles to show the
date temporarily when the mouse pointer enters the clock window.
- The tkgoodstuff menu now can be used anywhere in the Menu client
menu as a cascade (before it would pop up oddly). Also, for now
there is only one Menu client menu (anyone sorely miss having 3?).
- We take advantage of the /proc filesystem (e.g., on Linux):
+ Load now reads /proc/loadavg if it exists (and otherwise exec's
uptime).
+ Net now by default reads /proc/net/route if it exists (and
otherwise exec's ifconfig).
4.1b6: 4/30/96
- There is a new on-line preferences manager (so you don't have to
edit the rc file by hand). Start up tkgoodstuff. You will get a
default configuration. Select Preferences from the tkgoodstuff
menu, and choose the "Configuration" section. Here, add, delete or
move Client, AddButton, AddLabelBox, stacking, and panel-creating
commands. Then, save the preferences and restart. Now you can set
using the preferences manager the things you used to have to adjust
with variables.
- tkgoodstuff:
+ New options for icon scale and font scale (small or large).
Also, where an iconfile is called for, you can specify
"%biffnew" and tkgoodstuff will look, depending on whether the
scale is small or large, for biffnew.xpm or biffnew-sm.xpm.
+ New option for standard padding inside buttons, etc. Adjust
to 0 for very busy but compact look, to 2 or 3 for more roomy
look.
+ Now you can specify a pathlist of icon directories
in the preferences manager. You also can specify an icon that
is somewhere in that path with just its name (full filenames
work too).
+ In fullscreen mode, now you can "drag" the main border to
move the panel to another edge of the screen. It's a quick
hack (if we go from horizontal to vertical or vice versa we
save a changed fullscreen-side preference and restart
tkgoodstuff), but nothing wouldn't be better. We should really
be able to do this on the fly (which means regridding, and
resizing the auto-sized clients (Clock, Pager, Load).
+ Also there is a new option Auto-minimize which in fullscreen
mode reduces tkgoodstuff to a line along the edge of the screen
when the mouse leaves the tkgoodstuff panel.
+ Killed (I hope) bug without understanding why: sometimes in
auto-minimize mode clicking on a panelbutton would cause an
error whose entire stack trace is ("after" script). Since
removing an "update" command from TKGPanelButtonInvoke, I no
longer see this problem. Any speculations as to why would be
welcome!
- New Client: TkMan, by G. Dezern, interfaces with the tkman man
page viewer the way our WWW client interfaces with web browsers.
- WindowList: Shorten windownames before using scrollbar (patch
from E. Kahler).
- Biff:
+ Mail-checking methods now work as advertised (thanks R. Angiel
and G. Dezern). I hope.
+ Optional on-button display of number of new messages (except
for users of the mh method). (Thanks R. Angiel.)
+ Display of new messages was too fancy, or not fancy enough, to
work right; now we just display the entire header with the message.
+ MH method much, much improved thanks to G. Dezern.
+ Multiple mailbox support thanks to G. Dezern.
- Net:
+ Added elapsed-time-of-connection counter.
+ Deleted net-type from label.
- Jots and Calc: respond sensibly to window manager DELETEs.
- Icons: ruthless color-pruning. Now the icons use colors from a
palette of 19 colors, and tkgoodstuff's default widget colors are
among them.
- tkxpm and tkfvwm: much tidier configure scripts (not using
autoconf), relying on tclConfig.sh and tkConfig.sh. Also, fvwm
source is no longer needed to compile tkfvwm (libfvwm2.a is now
installed at fvwm installation). M. Beynon contributed bug fixes.
4.1b5: 2/27/96
Now tkgoodstuff assumes tk4.1b1 or later (we're aiming at supporting
the ultimate 4.1 release, and backward compatibility is too much
work).
- tkgoodstuff:
+ We use the grid geometry manager rather than pack for almost
everything. TKGPack is superseded by TKGGrid. Had hoped that
this would make fullscreen mode easier, but no.
+ Added subpanels which are formed with StartPanel and
EndPanel, can be linked to a button with PanelButton, or placed
on the screen at startup with PutPanel. See the tkgoodstuffrc
html docs for more.
+ Now xpm capability is mandatory. I hope Ioi Lam's xpm image
type will get in the core before our main 4.1 release.
+ "create-label-box" renamed to "TKGLabelBox". NOTE!!!
+ AddButton and AddLabelBox no longer take a name as first
argument. NOTE!!!
+ Clock_zerotrim moved to tkgoodstuff and called TKGZeroTrim.
+ Use "ps -p [pid]" if "ps [pid]" gives an error, and don't
assume there's a STAT column in the ps output (thanks
J. Robinson).
+ Implement TKGAddToHook and TKGDoHook (general hook
utilities). Several hooks are defined (for client use) in
tkgoodstuff, Fvwm.tcl, etc.
+ Change default fonts to non-italic, non-bold.
- Biff: avoid tcl7.5b1's gets bugs by not doing "gets $f var".
- New client "Pager" by Eric Kahler. Check out the current
version in this distribution. Needs tkgoodstuff to be run as an
fvwm module (from the fvwm window manager).
- New client "Chooser" by Eric Kahler. Pops up a window at
startup to let you choose among different tkgoodstuff
configuration files.
- New client in "alpha" stage: Calc (dec/hex/oct calculator).
Has paper-tape-like scrollable history. Some features not
implemented, but it's fairly usable. I'm not inclined to develop
this further right now, so I'd be very happy if someone were to
adopt it.
- New client in "beta" stage: Webster (net dictionary client).
Pops up a definition of the word you highlight (the current X
selection). Can use unix "webster" command, but also has its own
internal webster client code (using the new Tcl socket stuff,
with a kludge required because Tcl strings can't yet contain
NULLs).
- The tkfvwm source is now included in the tkgoodstuff
distribution.
- The fvwm WindowList feature has become a client. To call it,
you now issue "Client WindowList". It's become more robust too,
I hope. I also added a few default icons for shells, editors,
mailers, newsreaders. If it doesn't recognize your favorite
apps of these types, please let me know the resource Class name,
and the application type (e.g., "Xmh" is a mailer, "XTerm" is a
shell). I'd be happy to have some graphically competent person revise
these or submit other 11x11 icons.
- Fvwm: fvwm's messages are more easily available to clients, we
maintain a more complete database of the information available
from fvwm, and we slightly enhanced tkfvwm (the new version of
tkfvwm4.1 is needed to take advantage of all the information).
Look at Fvwm.tcl for more info. These changes were primarily to
support WindowList and Eric Kahler's cool Pager client.
- Clock, Ical, Jots: use the new "clock" command instead of "exec
date".
- Ical: Gave one alarm per item per calendar fetch. Oops. Stick
to one per item.
- Jots: Made widgets behave sensibly under manual resizing (until
tk4.1b1's empty-frame bug showed up, that is).
- Net: (bug) call TKGButton, not TKGMakeButton, to change the
text on a switch of net types. Also, (feature removal) don't
bind mouse <3> to change Net_type (too confusing for those who
don't want it and don't want to know about it, and it's easy
enough to change types with the popup menu).
(Earlier changes available on request.)
--
Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL:http://www.hpc.uh.edu/fvwm/>.
To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm" in the body of a
message to majordomo_at_hpc.uh.edu.
To report problems, send mail to fvwm-owner_at_hpc.uh.edu.
Received on Wed May 22 1996 - 15:55:45 BST