| In every sense DOpus tries to emulate Workbench, and that's where icons come in.
If you've joined us from version 4 you'll be wondering why there's a chapter on icons at
all, not being used to them yourself, but DOpus uses icons - not only standard Workbench
icons, but also left-outs, appicons and its own internal icons to the full.
DOpus gives you normal icons, MagicWB icons and NewIcons and you're free to mix and
match them as you will. It's worth noting that although DOpus can give you access to
NewIcons there is one limitation - if you want appicons NewIcons-style, then you'll still
have to run the NewIcons program in your user-startup by calling it with the usual
run >nil: <nil: c:newicons
command. Other than that, if your ambitions don't lie in the area of having NewIcon
appicons for your programs, you don't really need the patch at all.
In addition to having the standard icons for files, DOpus also offers one other
function familiar to NewIcons user, that of default icons for filetypes. If you use the
filetyping system in DOpus, you'll notice that there's a space in the definition for a
default icon for a filetype. Basically this shows the icon if shown in icon (or icon
action) mode with show all files (shortcut:  ;) turned on.
Opus also tries to make icons as configurable as possible, depending on whether you
like the standard WB3 style (or MagicWB style) or the borderless style that NewIcons
favours, you can set a global default in the environment editor (shortcut:
4). However, as we all know
there are some icons that look better in a way that's different to the default you set up
(wouldn't you know it) so you can individually tweak settings by calling up DOpus' icon
information window for a particular icon and hitting the right mouse button. This gives
you a menu of actions you can perform on this icon, from changing its type to setting the
border and label on and off. Also, thanks to the enhanced drag 'n drop functionality that
DOpus provides, if you wish to replace an icon's image, all you need do is drag your new
icon over the old one. DOpus will then ask you whether you want to copy the standard icon
image, the newicon image or both over, and you've got a new icon. Easy. You can also do
the same for tooltypes, but be warned that you get no confirmation of your action, the new
tooltypes just get appended to the old.
Although you can explore the "Icon Settings" portion of the environment
editor in the manual and through experimentation, we thought we'd just cover each entry in
detail here, for further reference.
- Allow icons with no labels - You'll possibly leave this unticked since it's
usually only an error in the icon that makes this feasible under Workbench. However, this
is one setting that can't be overridden by individual icon settings, so if you want any
of your icons to not have labels you'd better tick this.
- Borderless icons are fully transparent - If you have this switched on then all
portions of the icon image that use whatever you have as colour 0 in your palette, usually
a mid-grey, will be transparent, however, if you don't have it on, then only the outside
edges of your icon will be.
- Cache icon images - If you have the memory, you can cache your icon images so
that you'll get much faster icon display on repeated access of a particular drive or
drawer.
- Force split of long labels - This is linked to the "Split long labels"
flag later on, basically it means that your icon labels will be split even if they don't
match the criteria set for splitting an icon label. See?
- Icon borders on by default - This is for the MagicWB/NewIcons camps. Turn them on
and your DOpusbench looks like "normal" Workbench, turn them off and it looks
like you run NewIcons even if all your icons are in the MWB style.
- Perform all actions on icons - This means that if you delete or copy a file, the
same will happen to its icon.
- Quick icon dragging - DOpus tries to make everything look really nice all the
time. If, however, you aren't bothered by these niceties you can turn this flag on and
have superfast but dead ugly icon scrolling and dragging.
- Real-time icon scrolling - Pretty much ditto to the last entry!
- Remap icon images - Remap icon images attempts to make MagicWB icons look good no
matter how many colours your Workbench screen is. If you are using NewIcons (or just
aren't using MagicWB icons) you can turn it off.
- Remove Opus icon positions - This is related to the last flag in the list
"Use Workbench icon positions". If you are going to be sharing files with
someone who (shock, horror!) isn't running DOpus then you might want to flick it on so
that your icons don't look weirdly snapshot under Workbench.
- Select icons automatically - Rather than just performing all the actions on a
file's icon, you can set DOpus to actually visibly select it too.
- Show arrow on left-out icons - This handy mnemonic helps to differentiate between
icon types by overlaying an arrow image onto the corner of an icon to show that it has
been left out of its normal position.
- Smart icon copying - Smart icon copying will copy icon files using the system
icon functions; this is slower and can cause problems with some programs but results in
greater system compatibility. Usually you will have it turned off.
- Split long icon labels - Under Workbench, things can be a bit of a pain when you
use the full 31 characters that available for naming a file (well, 26 since you need to
add ".info" for the icon). This function allows you to split any filename longer
than 150% of the icon's width into two lines. It does it as safely as possible, by looking
for natural break characters like a hyphen or space. Turning on the "Force"
option will simply break the line at that precise 150% mark.
- Trap 'More' in default tool - Since DOpus has a fine internal text viewer it
would be a shame if you were forced to used Commodore's old More command to view files, so
DOpus offers the limited tool alias ability of trapping More as the default tool for a
project icon and showing the text in DOpus' internal text viewer instead.
- Use custom drag routines - Although not quite as system-friendly as the ordinary
icon routines, they are much faster, so if they work on your machine, do make use of them
- experiment is the key.
- Use Workbench icon positions - Again, this is linked with the "Remove Opus
icon positions" flag in the sense that you will be using Workbenches positioning
information for an icon rather than Opus' own internal routines. This means that you'll
only have one set of positioning info in each icon whether you're seeing it under
Workbench or under Opus.
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Don't forget the right mouse button! There are plenty of places that DOpus has a
pop-up menu for an RMB action. |
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Icon Positioning
Possibly the best thing about having Directory Opus as a replacement for Workbench is
the fact that you no longer have to deal with icons appearing in the top-left corner of
your screen where you might have your hard drive and ram icons. Previously, you would have
had to run a program like ForceIcon to ensure that a rogue CD-ROM wouldn't mess up your
icon positioning, but now you can use DOpus' helpful icon positioning window. Although it
looks like a normal window when you call it up from the settings window, if you hold down
the RMB you'll notice that you can set discrete areas of the screen for different icons.
By default, all the different icons are set by the one positioning window, but you can
turn off various icon types so that you can set up separate areas of the screen for
different icon types, assigning them a priority so that as one area fills up the next area
prioritised will be used.
Icon for Filetypes
If you are familiar with NewIcons' DefIcons setup whereby files without icons are given
"fake" ones to indicate their filetype, you'll like DOpus' system of doing the
same. But whereas NewIcons' DefIcons needed a lot of work, adding an icon to a DOpus
filetype is as simple as just selecting the icon you wish to use but there are a couple of
caveats. The main one is to watch out for project icons that already have a default tool.
If you use this sort of icon as your filetype icon you'll find that the default tool in
the icon will override your filetype settings and might lead to a completely unexpected
situation. Of course this can be useful. As an example, I use HTML files a lot. While in
name mode I can double click on them to edit them, but in icon mode, if I double click on
an HTML file it will load into iBrowse. Why? Because I've set the default tool for the
HTML project icon I use for filetyping to use iBrowse as the default tool! This way I have
doubled what I can do with a file without doing any extra work.
The other caveat is to watch what sort of icon you are using as a default filetype
icon. Although they aren't real icons in the truest sense - there's no icon file in the
directory - other programs will use them as such, so beware of using drawer or tool icons
instead of project ones. If in doubt, you can always check by simply opening an icon
information window for the icon you suspect and looking in the titlebar for what sort of
icon it is. You can then use the pop-up menu in the icon information window to correctly
use the project icon type.
But don't stop there. DOpus' filetypes also allow you to give new icons to volumes that
either don't have one, or can't have a new one written to them, like CDs. Simply create a
new filetype for the type of device you wish to have a new icon for like so:
Disk CD0: override
and use a filetype icon for the device. Then whenever you put a CD in your CD-ROM drive
you'll get the icon of your choice appearing.
Pick a chapter:
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