[Pan-users] Re: Re: ANN: Pan 0.105 "When Churchill opened the door, it was a new car, a Chevrolet Nova."

[Duncan]

Brad Sims <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 27 Jul
2006 17:11:13 -0500:

> On Thursday 27 July 2006 12:38 pm, Duncan wrote:
>> I can confirm editing accels.txt works!  =8^)  Just the old GUI method
>> of setting them doesn't, but perhaps that's by design, as with the >4
>> connection feature?  As long as accels.txt works, I'm happy! =8^)
> 
> Does one simply change the accel.txt? I prefer to comment out the line I
> am changing and add my version below it. It makes it easy to revert back.
> 
> Does the ";" indicate a comment or no?

; indicates a comment, yes.  By default, all lines are commented, as they
represent the default mapping.

A note on editing it, however.  I haven't modified enough hotkeys or done
testing to be sure if new-pan works the same in this regard as old-pan did
or not, but I'd suspect so.  Don't expect any comments you make to still
be there on return, as pan reads in the file at start and rewrites it on
quit, but ONLY rewrites its current mapping, so any comments or reordering
you did is lost every time!

Thus, in ordered to be able to reorder it and add your own comments,
you'll have to save it to another file, always work with that, and copying
it over to the one pan reads with pan closed, so it will read the changes
at startup and consequently rewrite them (rescrambled of course), at close.

If you remap more than a couple entries, you'll likely find a couple
additional techniques I developed useful as well. 

1) In your (not pan's) copy, reorder by menu, blank lines between menus
(pan will ignore them when it reads them in from its copy, but of course
won't write them back out when it writes the scrambled copy back), in
either alpha order or the same order as pan has, so you don't have to use
your editor's search feature to find what you want each time.

2) Either in a separate file, or at the top or bottom of your copy, keep a
table of the current mappings by key, such as the below.  That way,
you track what mappings are available, and which are already in use and
will need remapped if you want to use them elsewhere.  (x=char, c=ctrl,
s=shft, a=alt, csa-x=ctrl-shft-alt-char...  The below maps the "a" char by
itself, ctrl-a, shift-a, and shift-alt-a, by example.)

;char x c-x s-x a-x cs-x ca-x sa-x csa-x 
;a    a c-a s-a               sa-a
;b
;c
...
;z
;1
;2
...
;9
;0
;`
;-
;=
;bks
;tab
...
;lft
;rht
...
;hm
;end
...
;f1
;f2
...

Yes, the function keys, home, end, and the like can (mostly) be mapped. 
Sometimes it takes a bit of experimentation to figure out what format pan
expects to see them in.  With the old pan's interactive setting, one could
usually try a couple exotic settings that could be set interactively and go
from there on the others, but with new-pan not seeming to have the
interactive setting method at all (doesn't seem to work here, anyway),
it'll be a bit more challenging. <g>

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman