editres(1X)editres(1X)NAMEeditres - a dynamic resource editor for X Toolkit applications
SYNOPSISeditres [-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.
DESCRIPTIONeditres 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: A set
of popup menus that allow you full access to editres's features. The
panner allows a more intuitive way to scroll the application tree dis‐
play. Displays information to the user about the action that editres
expects of her. This area will be used to display the selected appli‐
cation'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 proto‐
col 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
Allows the user to click on any application that speaks the editres
protocol and receive its 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. 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. 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 Mes‐
sage Area. This command will popup a simple dialog box for set‐
ting 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. Exits editres.
TREE COMMANDS
The Tree menu contains several commands that allow operations to be
performed on the widget tree. This menu item allows you to select any
widget in the application; editres will then highlight the correspond‐
ing 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 use‐
ful feedback between the elements in the widget tree and those in the
actual application. These functions allow the user to select, unse‐
lect, or invert all widgets in the widget tree. These functions select
the immediate parent or children of each of the currently selected wid‐
gets. These functions select all parents or children of each of the
currently selected widgets. This is a recursive search. 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 wid‐
get'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. 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 wid‐
gets 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. 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. 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. The next area allows you to select the name of
the normal or constraint resources you wish to set. Some wid‐
gets may not have constraint resources, so that area will not
appear. 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 cur‐
rent 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. This area contains several command buttons, described in
this section. 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. 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. This but‐
ton 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 spe‐
cific applications to block these SetValues requests (see Block‐
ing 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. This button combines the Save and Apply actions
described above into one button. 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.
Specifies which type of blocking this application wishes to impose on
the editres protocol.
The accepted values are: Block all requests. 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. 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: Specifies the num‐
ber of times the widgets in the application will be flashed when the
Show Active Widgets command is invoked. Amount of time between the
flashes described above. 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. This is
the file the resource line will be append to when the Save button acti‐
vated 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
to get the default host and display number. 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
specifies required resources
SEE ALSOX(1X), xrdb(1X), Athena Widget Set
AUTHOR
Chris D. Peterson, formerly MIT X Consortium
editres(1X)