OpenEuphoria

[DOS]{widgets]

• Posted by tacitus <indor at PRIMUS.COM.AU> Oct 27, 2000
• 361 views

hi

i've been playing with jiri's widgets. thought i'd post a few
issues/questions/problems for input/consideration or maybe even to help
others.

1. the msgbox.e name conflicts with same-named routine in euphoria include
folder. so if you try to put the widget msgbox.e in the include folder, you
may overwrite the euphoria msgbox.e. any chance of a name change next
edition, jiri?

2. in higher resolutions, my rat leaves an ugly trail behind it. use_vesa()
doesn't fix. it looks more like programmed alternative rat behaviour, but
for some reason i get the wrong default rat (only in high resolutions).
anyone else experiencing this?

3. assuming that can be fixed, i'd like a library function that returns:
-the user's default resolution in windows; and/or
-the highest resolution of which the card and monitor are capable;
so i can automatically start programs in one of these modes.
can somebody help with this? i'm guessing that video_config() returns a dos
configuration, not a windows one.

4. the widgets look really cool in high resolution, except for the poorly
house-trained rat, and the fact that the default font is quite small. could
routine above also get the dos equivalent of the user's default font size
and type in windows? or alternatively, could default font sizes be adjusted
in the library for different resolutions? with these things simplified, the
widgets really would compare very well with the windows interface.

5. in the various controls displaying text, such as sle or reader, text
including a tilde "~" adopts the hotkey behaviour of a tilde - i.e. the
tilde disappears and the letter(s) following the first tilde change to the
hotkey colour until you get to the next tilde. this is a problem because
dos filenames so often include tildes. in an sle control, the behaviour is
doubly baffling to the user, because it only happens after you press enter.
the sle then returns the full text to the program but only displays the
tildeless text.

6. i really think the documentation is hard for learners. to fetch the
selected choice of two radio buttons, i eventually came up with this, which
looks far too long to be correct:

object recursion, non_recursion, selection
recursion = part(recurse_buttons, 257 & "Recursive")
non_recursion = part(recurse_buttons, 257  "Non-recursive")
selection = item(recurse_buttons, "sel")
if selection = non_recursion then
return 0
elsif selection = recursion then
return 1
else return -- error message handler
end if

is there an easier way, or should i be writing a library like win32lib? if
latter, wouldn't external library written like this be slow? (did you
notice that hint, jiri?)

7. an area i struggled with was knowing what items and components were,
both in terms of what they represent and what they return. for example,
when working with radio buttons, i print()ed the indexes of each button and
got 75,77,79 and 81 - completely random numbers to me, which is one of the
reasons i ended up with the above code. there are some items that are not
documented at all, such as "sta" (?????). i'd be happy to help with
documentation if i was confident i knew what i was writing about. (i
actually know something about writing).

8. in the demos, there was a line p(w) or something like that. i couldn't
find any documentation on it at all. can anyone tell me what it does?

cheers
tacitus