Address Bar for Calmira

Version 1.11 21/1/00
by Maxim Gready.
There's more Calmira-related stuff in Maxim's World of Stuff
and the latest version of Address Bar is also there.

[ Description ] [ Instructions ] [ Keys ] [ Settings ] [ How to set up Calmira's DOS scripts ] [ Notes ] [ History ] [ Bugs ] [ Future enhancements ]

Description

This is my attempt to reproduce the Address Bar you can put in your taskbar in Windows 98 and Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 4. Microsoft has since released Internet Explorer 5, with a slightly different Address Bar, but I don't think I'll be able to reproduce that without doing some component rewriting :o(

Instructions

This program requires fully set up Dos script support, see How to set up Calmira's DOS scripts for more information.
The first time you run Address Bar it will ask you to find your calmira.ini file. You should never have to do this again.
To use it, just run it and start to type a path to a file you want. It will guess what you are going to type next, based on which files are on your disks. An icon will appear by the list box to indicate what has been found - a drive, folder/directory, file or URL. If the icon disappears then nothing has been found. The part that has been guessed is selected, so if you type some more then it will be overwritten. If it's correct then you can press End or Tab to append some more, or if it's nearly right then you can use the cursors to move through the text and correct it. If this doesn't make much sense then just give it a go, you'll soon get the hang of it.

This should make it much quicker for you to navigate through your disks to the file you want. When you find it, press Enter and it will be passed to Calmira via the Start or Folder script commands. It will also be added to the drop-down list, so you can access it later.

Right-click on the window to get some settings - see Settings. Click on the X button to close the window. There are sizing handles at each end, although they do let you resize the window too small, so you don't want to do that. Most of the window is draggable to move it.

Keys

• Up and Down move through the drop-down list.
• Escape closes the program.
• The normal editing keys apply, although the left-hand clipboard keys (Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) trigger an update and the right-hand ones (Shift+Del, Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins respectively) don't.
• F1 brings up the About box, like the menu implies.
• Tab does the same as End - it moves the cursor to the end of the line.
• Ctrl+T makes it sit on the taskbar - useful if you change resolution and it's off-screen.

Settings

First, top to bottom in the popup menu:

Address checking	If this is on then if what you typed isn't a directory, file or URL (ie. the icon has disappeared), then when you press Enter, nothing will happen. Or rather, the text in the box will change to whatever's at the top of the history; I might fix this for a later version.
Exit on use	If checked, when you press Enter, the window will close.
Stay on top	If checked, the window will stay on top of other windows.
Show taskbar icon	If unchecked then the window will be hidden and its icon will disappear. However, Calmira's taskbar doesn't pick up unhidden windows, so the program will ask you to unhide it yourself from Calmira's task manager (which updates the taskbar); if you don't then it will have an icon next time you run it.
Sit on taskbar	This rather dumbly moves the window to the right of the screen and to 29 pixels from the bottom, which is appropriate if you set up an applet tray icon for it. Of course, if your taskbar is taller or at the top of the screen then this is not very useful.
Help/About	Displays a little message box.

Then, the harder-to-get-to ini file settings:

CheckingOn	These are the settings from the first four items in the above table. 1=checked, 0=unchecked.
AutoExit
StayOnTop
ShowIcon
HistorySize	This sets how many items are stored in the history. Note that the drop-down list is set to automatically size big enough to fit them all in, so you might be in trouble if you set this to a large number.
Width	These set the position and size of the window, in pixels. If you change resolution and lose the window then Ctrl+T should bring it back for you.
Left
Top
URLPrefixes	This setting is the same as Calmira's, you put in strings separated by spaces which you want to be recognised as the start of URLs. Of course, you must make Calmira's setting the same - it's in the [Internet] section.
CalmiraIni	this stores the location of Calmira's ini file, so that Address Bar can read the DosScriptFilename setting.

All of the ini settings have default values, and the ini file will be created if it's not there.

Finally, the command line parameters (these aren't really needed any more, they're from before there was an ini file):

exit	Checks Exit on use.
nocheck	Unchecks Address Checking.

How to set up Calmira's DOS scripts

Open up the System Properties dialogue (try Start - Settings - Calmira), scroll the checklist down about halfway, and check both Enable MS-DOS command prompt scripts and Enable scripts to be run under Windows. Click on OK and you've done it!
You might want to fully set up scripts - see Calmira's Help file (Contents - Advanced Features - Using script files).

Notes

• The only computers I have access to are a 450MHz K6-2 and a 266MHz PII. These aren't exactly representative of the average Calmira system, so the performance may be a little slow.
• Early versions of Address Bar tended to lock up horribly (enough to stop Ctrl-Alt-Del working). I never figured out what was going on, and it hasn't happened since I rewrote some of the program, but it could still happen.
• You cannot run more than one copy of Address Bar at once - this is on purpose!
• You might want to set up a keyboard shortcut to Address Bar (see Defining keyboard shortcuts in Calmira's help file). However, these won't start applet tray items, so you'll have to add Address Bar to your Start Menu to get this to work. I would suggest Shift+Ctrl+O - that's what I use.

History

Beta
This version was just written straight off and it was buggy and seriously crashed windows quite a lot. There were no settings, just command line parameters and as a result it wouldn't work on all configurations
1.00
I rewrote most of the code, and in the process most of the bugs disappeared (and a few new ones appeared). This one had proper settings and its own ini file.
1.01
A minor bugfix, Stay on Top wasn't being saved and a user asked for the Tab key to act like End - see, suggestions get results!
1.1
I realised that I was incorrectly using the TempScript environment variable, so I rewrote it so it read DosScriptFilename directly from calmira.ini. I also tweaked a few other things, and to congratulate myself I gave it a whole 0.09 upgrade!
1.11
Caleb Tutty asked for the ability to shut down - just type sd, shut down or shutdown (and just s autocompletes for you!). And Ctrl+T was added because I keep losing it when I change resolution.

Bugs

• For reasons beyond my control, it's quite easy to type too quickly for the program to keep up with, especially when the command line is getting long.
• If you add Address Bar to your applet tray (which is what I always intended) then the "Show taskbar icon" setting has no effect, because Calmira never shows an icon for an applet tray program. If you want an icon then you can create an alias for Address Bar in a subdirectory of Calmira called tray - see Taskbar in Calmira's help file.

Future enhancements

These are things that, given time, inclination and intelligence, I would add to Address Bar. Some are more tricky than others so you can guess which are more likely to happen...

• Description support - ideally a findfirst/next replacement that handled it all (don't worry if this means nothing to you!)
• Calmira integration - so it was actually part of the taskbar, in a modified Calmira release.
• It should be easy to make it auto-detect when it's offscreen and move itself back on.
• It might be possible to make it work with non-standard taskbars better (ie. top of screen and/or multi-level).