EDITRES(1)
Contents
editres - a dynamic resource editor for X Toolkit applica
tions
editres [ -toolkitoption ... ]
Editres accepts all of the standard X Toolkit command line
options (see X(1)). The order of the command line options
is not important.
Editres is a tool that allows users and application devel
opers to view the full widget hierarchy of any X Toolkit
application that speaks the Editres protocol. In addi
tion, editres will help the user construct resource speci
fications, 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.
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 intu
itive way to scroll the applica
tion 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 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.
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 informa
tion 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 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 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 wid
gets. 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.
The Tree menu contains several commands that allow opera
tions 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 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 operations. If the input focus is over an indi
vidual 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 command, it will show the user each widget
that is currently selected in the widget tree, by
flashing the corresponding widget in the applica
tion 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.
The resource box contains five different areas. Each of
the areas, as they appear on the screen, from top to bot
tom 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 wid
gets this resource will apply to. The area con
tains 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 spe
cial buttons called Any Widget which will general
ize 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 restric
tive, using the resource names and the dot separa
tor. 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 exam
ple, 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 car
riage-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 file
name.
Apply This button attempts to perform a XtSetValues call
on all widgets 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 han
dle, a hook has been provided 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 Man
ager, 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 func
tionality 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.
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 information 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 mod
ifies 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 applica
tion, 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 applica
tion, 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.
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 wid
gets. 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.
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 struc
ture. 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 <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
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_MAN
AGER property.
<XRoot>/lib/X11/app-defaults/Editres - specifies required
resources
X(1), xrdb(1), Athena Widget Set
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.
Chris D. Peterson, formerly MIT X Consortium
X Version 11 Release 6.4 9
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