EDITRES - a dynamic resource editor for X Toolkit applications - man(1) - [phpMan]

Che Dong

EDITRES(1) General Commands Manual EDITRES(1)

NAME
editres - a dynamic resource editor for X Toolkit applications

SYNTAX
editres [ -toolkitoption ... ]

OPTIONS
Editres accepts all of the standard X Toolkit command line options (see X(7)). 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 hier‐
archy 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 fea‐
tures.

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 ex‐
pects 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 pro‐
tocol then editres will display the application's widget tree in its tree window. If the ap‐
plication 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 re‐
ceive its widget tree.

Refresh Current Widget Tree
Editres only knows about the widgets that exist at the present time. Many applica‐
tions create and destroy widgets on the fly. Selecting this menu item will cause ed‐
itres 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 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 appli‐
cation 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 wid‐
get tree.

Select Children

Select Parents
These functions select the immediate parent or children of each of the currently se‐
lected widgets.

Select Descendants

Select Ancestors
These functions select all parents or children of each of the currently selected wid‐
gets. 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 cor‐
respond 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 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 wid‐
get 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 corre‐
sponding widget in the application numFlashes (three by default) times in the flash‐
Color.

Key Option Translation Entry
-
space Unselect Select(nothing)
w Select Select(widget)
s Select Select(all)
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 some‐
thing 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 re‐
strictions 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 con‐
tains 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.

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 re‐
source 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 Set‐
Values 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 behav‐
ior 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 applica‐
tion. 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 pos‐
sible for any Xaw application to specify a value for the editresBlock resource described be‐
low, to keep editres from divulging information about its internals, or to disable the Set‐
Values 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 actu‐
ally 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 indi‐
vidual 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 ed‐
itres (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 in 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 com‐
pose editres. In the notation below, indentation indicates hierarchical structure. The wid‐
get 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.

FILES
/etc/X11/app-defaults/Editres
specifies required resources

SEE ALSO
X(7), xrdb(1), Athena Widget Set

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.

AUTHOR
Chris D. Peterson, formerly MIT X Consortium

X Version 11 editres 1.0.8 EDITRES(1)

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