Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

Frank Nord continues
his beginners
series with a look
at Workbench's
menus
Would you
like to see
, the menu?
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p m . venom, Two
,,,, backdrop
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disks? Good. This month I thought we
would cover the menu system that
aNEMO
AmigoDOS uses on Workbench, In my
, opinion Workbench's menus are the best of the four
nmain
operating systems that most people are familiar
••••••••
owith,
The Mac's mouse only has one button so you
-have
to click at the top of the screen to get menus to
o
appear, and the fines are there all the time, taking
up space that could be used for something else.
n
Although Windows supports three button mice,
e most applications still use the left mouse button to do
geverything,
like the Mac. Menu titles ore also on con-
ostant
display and have to be clicked on to oppear.
t The menus in Windows are even worse when it
acomes
to keyboard shortcuts Both the Mac ond the
nAmiga
use fairly standard keys for commonplace
y operations, like Amigo-0 for quit, while Windows
wiRTA• lk.
puses
the really obvious shortcut Alt•Frt to exit an
r
application.
The Mari Sr's operating system is based around
o
GEM, one of the first GUI systems, ond is pretty poor
b
compared to the others. To get at menus on an ST,
lall
you have to do is move your mouse up to the top
eof
the screen. But this can be a source of annoyance
The AfTliga'S menu
bar hide s a whe ts,
host of use ful
functions a nd
comma nds
mas
you pop menus open unintentionally and slow
operation. This means you could have a directory
s down your work.
window open on Workbench, then access the
f But where the Amiga molly scores is in its unique
Window menu to show all files, view them by
oability
to select more than one menu item in a single
name, and select them all in one fluid motion. In
r
m
a
THE WORKBENCH MENU
t
t
i Backdrop Al - the backdrop command allows you
nto
turn on or off the main Workbench window. This
You can type a shell command into the text gadget
that appears and any results will appear in a text
window. You can use this menu item to open a
shell window by typing 'newshell' into the text
gwindow
contains all the drive icons you have gadget that appears.
mounted on your machine including the RAM disk.
When you double-click on an icon it opens a window
in the normal fashion, but you can impress
Redraw All
people with the speed of your machine by opening Redraw all - redraw all and the following item,
a load of windows and then clicking them to the
back of the main Workbench window. Then, when
Update all, ore both rarely used and are for
refreshing the screen display and updating drawer
you double-click on o drive icon whose window contents respectively.
you already have open, the window will pop to the
front of the Workbench window instantly, making
it look as though you have a super fast hard drive.
Update All
If yor want to get rid of the backdrop window Update all -see above.
on a permanent basis, you should turn on the
backdrop item and then, making sure you have
no windows selected on Workbench, use the
Last Message
'snapshot window' item ,
Last Massage - shows the last message that
he Wi
nExecute
Command...
d
()tow,. command... AZ -this item opens a window
on o Workbench w that's like a one-shot Shell window.
appeared in the Workbench title bar. This can
be useful if an AmigaDOS error appears and
disappears too quickly to be seen.
• We'll carry this on next issue and move onto the
other menus.
m
.
o n o
• -re
AMIGA ill COMPUTING
FEBRUARY iff
/ 996
Abibm
case you don't know how to perform this fear, ;I E5
simplicity itself.
Try it for yourself by following the example I just
used. Open a window that usually contains files
without icons like the RAM disk, for example. Now
hold down the right mouse button as usual to access
the Window menu, but instead of just letting go ofo
when you are over the right option, click the left
mouse button once instead. Click the left mouse but
ton on the 'show all files' item first, then on the 'view
by name' option. tosHy, let go of the right mouse but
ton when you are on the 'select contents' menu item
and the menu will disappear back up at the top of
the screen. Your RAM disk window will rush about
showing the files, changing them into text, and then
selecting them all.
Now I know that this demonstration doesn't °du. I
ally serve very many useful purposes, but you may
well have programs like PageStream that have menu
options that can have tick marks next to them to indicate
that they hove been selected. You can now
select more than one option at once, rather than
selecting one, waiting for the operation to occur,
going bock to the menu, waiting, going back to the
menu, and so on.
So let's have a good look at the menus provided
by Woiithench and check out what options they provide.
While we are doing this you will notice that
some menu options are 'ghosted' - the text looks
funny. This is a visual indication of a menu item that
cannot be used at the present time. For instance, if
you have no windows open or selected, then there is
little point in using the 'show all files' menu item, so it
is ghosted.