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EDITRES(1) 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(7x)). 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 pro-
tocol then editres will display the application's widget tree in its
tree window. If the application does not understand the editres pro-
tocol 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 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 appli-
cation. 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 dis-
play. 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 applica-
tion; 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 dis-
played. Since some widgets are fully obscured by their chil-
dren, it is not possible to get to every widget this way, but
this mechanism does give very useful feedback between the ele-
ments 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 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 addition there are keyboard accelerators for each of the Tree oper-
ations. 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 com-
mand, it will show the user each widget that is currently
selected in the widget tree, by flashing the corresponding wid-
get 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 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 wid-
get, 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.
\ - 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 but-
ton. 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 wid-
gets 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 pro-
vided 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 pro-
vided 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 editres-
Block resource described below, to keep editres from divulging infor-
mation 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 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 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
.
.
.
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
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Editres
specifies required resources
SEE ALSO
X(7x), 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
EDITRES(1)
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