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editres(1X)
X11R6
NAME
editres - a dynamic resource editor for X Toolkit applications
SYNOPSIS
editres [-toolkitoption...]
OPTIONS
The editres command accepts all of the standard X Toolkit command line
options (see X(1X)). The order of the command line options is not
important.
DESCRIPTION
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.
USING EDITRES
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.
COMMANDS
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 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.
TREE COMMANDS
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 IDs
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 the case of 64
bit addressing these hex numbers will only be the lower 32 bits of the
widget's ID.
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
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.
USING THE RESOURCE BOX
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.
If the client application uses a version of the editres protocol that
can provide the current values of the widget's resources to the editres
editor, the initial value of the text in the Resource Value area will
be set to a representation of the current value of the resource.
Being able to display a meaningful text representation of the value
depends on the existence of a converter that can convert from the data
type of the resource to a text string. For any resource value that
cannot be converted to a text string, the value string will be a
decimal integer representation of the value followed by the string
(integer fallback conversion). If you enter a new value for this
resource, be sure to delete the (integer fallback conversion) string
and enter a string value in the appropriate format for conversion to
the resource's data type.
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.
BLOCKING EDITRES REQUESTS
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.
RESOURCES
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 is 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.
WIDGETS
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
ENVIRONMENT
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.
RESTRICTIONS
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.
FILES
<XRoot>/lib/X11/app-defaults/Editres
specifies required resources
SEE ALSO
X(1X), xrdb(1X), Athena Widget Set
AUTHOR
Chris D. Peterson, formerly MIT X Consortium
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Index for
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Alphabetical
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