It is strongly advised to use a three button mouse, or at least a two button one with third button
emulation (by simultaneaous pression of both buttons).
however, button 1 becomes button 2 if Shift key is depressed and button 3 if Ctrl key is depressed.
If you have a mousewhell, program it to send PgUp (or Prior) key code on rolling upwards and PgDn (or
Next) key code when rolling downwards.
basic elements handling
Within the window, you may change elements stacking order by Shift+Ctrl+button 1 (raise on top) and
Shift+Ctrl+button 3 (lower to bottom) and displace them by the Shift+Ctrl+button 2 combination.
Any of these combination outside of any window element brings back to window center any element lost
out of the window area.
text input dialog box
When a text editing or input is required, a rectangle cursor appears within the dialog box.
This cursor is filled if the windows has the keybord focus, otherwise it is outlined only.
(Note that cursor may not be visible if positionned just after the last character of the last line.)
While editing, arrows can be used to move within the editable text, begin and end keys moves
to the first/last editable character, delete clears the editable part of the text,
BackSpace erase the character just on the left of the cursor and enter or return
validates the input text.
During edition you may copy a text portion by either:
clicking with button 1 at the begining of the copy area, and with the button 3 at the end of copy area.
pressing button 1 and dragging it over the copy area and then release it.
double/triple click with button 1 to select word(s)/line(s)
Pressing button 2 (anywhere in the window) pasted selected text to the current cursor position
(regardless of the mouse pointer position).
Note: The copy/paste protocol conforms the X-window ICC protocol recommendations, using the CutBuffers
as a rescue in case of failure.
Many current applications however fails to conform to the X11R6 ICC recommendations and copy/paste may
fail or occurs with a 3 second delay with the rescue mechanism.
It seems that running Copy/Paste handling tools (such as KDE klipper) solves most of these compatibility
problems.
Note that some display boxes text content may be copied (if allowed by the application programmer).
Note also that some calculator applications (such as gcalc) requires that numerical value are NOT
followed or preceded by whitespace for the value to be pasted!
scrollbars and dial handling
Left button moves scrollbars to the left/up and decrease (moves clockwise) dial values.
Conversely Right button moves scrollbars to the right/down and increase (moves counterclockwise) dial
values.
file selector
within a file selector, clicking on the (...) symbol raises/lower of one page in the file list.
(equivalent to left/right clics on the vertical scrollbar)
Clicking on the first (square braketted) line, if allowed, makes it possible to edit the directory
and/or the file selection pattern.
Note that this requires that the file selection tool is large enough (close it, increase window width
and reopen it whenever the window is too narrow).
pattern syntax is close to that of most shells namely:
? stands for any character
\? stand for the ? character itself
* stands for any number of characters (even 0)
\* stands for the * character itself (though putting such a character in a filename is unwise)
[...] stand for any character of the list. Dash separated intervals are allowed within
the list, hence dash (minus) character must always be the first character in the list
\[ stands for the [ character itself (though putting such a character in a filename is unwise)
\\ stands for the \ character itself (though putting such a character in a filename isn't wise
either)
Changing the default font
It is possible to change the default font used by the interface with an enviromnent variable
EASYX11FILE that contains the path to a font file.
The easiest way to manage several alternative fonts (it may be usefull for visually impaired users or with
overhead projector on public presentation) is to put the alternative fonts in a directory (such as
/usr/local/etc/easyX11/fonts) and set the EASYX11DIR variable to this directory (e.g.
export EASYX11DIR=/usr/local/etc/easyX11/fonts/) set the EASYX11FILE variable to a local filename
(e.g. export EASYX11FILE=~/.easyX11rc) to which the font file will be symbolically linked by the
command
fonte font-name (beware of the e at the end of fonte, it is the french spelling).
(note that the font is set for the programs that will access the same file through EASYX11FILE variable.
In case of network distributed processing, such as may be intensively used by the pamela application, the
file pointed by EASYX11FILE must be globally available.)
You may download some other fonts here, note that only font smaller than 32×64
are allowed.
Server bugs
Some X-windows server implementations are bogus, try the mode -bug identifier command with
identifier being any of STARDENT, NCD, IBM, SUN and R3 (the mode -help command gives an help,
but it is in French).
mainly STARDENT and IBM bugs obscurates dialog boxes, NCD bug crashes when refreshing raised windows after
multiple obscursions, SUN bugs forbids to get keyboard focus and R3 bugs is in case windowmanager does not
handles colormap changes (as in old X11R3 servers).
color/light/contrast correction
There is an utility (easyX11gain) which provides the appropriate command to correct light/contrast
on aging CRT displays.
This utility opens a small window with 5 vertical cursors, adjust the central one to the position where
contrast of the thin line cancels (line becomes lighter than the background).
Then adjust the two neighbouring cursors the same way.
Finally, adjust the first/last cursors to the end of the saturated (black/white uniform) part of the scale.
Then clic on the ``fin'' box (it means ``end'' in French) and the appropriate command line for contrast
correction is displayed.
In case the gain has already been modified, make sure to reset it by mode -gain before launching
easyX11gain.
Relative gains for blue, green and red channels may be added at the end of the mode -gain ... command
in order to correct color balance.
(with modern display this feature is not very usefull, but this may help on some old CRT displays).
coloring schemes
Other coloring scheme than default may be used (if compatible with video card) through the mode command: try BITMAP (for very old black and white displays), PSEUDO, PSEUDOI (with this you can provide your own colormap ascii file path in the EASYX11PERSO environment variable)
,MONO, DIRECT, SCREEN, COLOR, TRAME, SPECIAL, OPTIMALn (with this n is the number of color cell allocated per image box).
The last four being for 256 color displays only, SPECIAL if appropriate for some old frame grabbers.
The command mode DEFAULT reactivates default mode.
(overall this feature is nearly obsolete)
Taping/replay
Environment variables EASYX11LOG or EASYX11REPLAY can be set to a filename, user actions are recorded
(resp. replayed) to/from the file. Note that due to the multi-process aspect of pamela, this capability
is not very usefull (use pamela batch mode instead).
noticeX11 interactive tutorial
There is an interactive user guide to easyX11 library written by C.Nahum. This program noticeX11 is
however only available in French. Nevertheless, since functions are illustrated by interactive examples
with copy/pastable source code, it may be possible to understand the function parameters meaning from the
window behaviour alone.