A short course in using NOTEPAD.ACC... NOTEPAD.ACC is a convenient little notepad accessory for your ST. It doesn't come with any instructions, but you can pretty much figure out how it works by playing with it. Some of its features aren't readily obvious, though, hence this short file. Choose the entry marked Notepad from your Desk menu and the Notepad window appears. This window is initially 8 lines by 32 characters, but it has a GEM resize box so you can alter it as you wish. (The smallest size allowed is 5 lines of 2(!) characters each... keeps the window out of the way if you need to see the whole underlying screen, and works fine as long as you don't need to read the notes you're taking. :-) The Notepad window does have a move bar, so you can place it wherever on your screen is most appropriate. Type whatever you wish in the window. The arrow keys will move the cursor for you, as will the mouse, and the delete, backspace, and tab keys work as expected. The window scrolls if you fill it up, and a standard GEM scroll bar at the side allows you to move forward and back in your text. If you resize the window, your text word-wraps to fit the new screen size... nice! Click on the close box to remove the Notepad window from your screen. When you next choose Notepad from the Desk menu, your text is still there. (Wouldn't be quite as useful otherwise, eh? :-) When Notepad is open, the menu bar from whatever application you were using is still visible. All of the menus will show up, but only the Desk menu is active - meaning you can use your other desk accessories from within Notepad! If you choose the Notepad entry while its window is open, you'll see a new menu with the choices Copy, Move, Delete, Find..., Load..., Save..., Print, and Clear. I'll start with the easy ones. Choose Load... and you'll be presented with the Item Selector, which will allow you to load Notepad with a text file from disk. (If you already have some text typed in, you have the option to append the file you choose or replace what's in the window.) Save..., obviously, will let you save the contents of Notepad to a disk file. One possible disadvantage here: Notepad uses ASCII for its files, but a hard return is saved as just a carriage return rather than the more standard carriage return/linefeed combination. This means, for example, that when you click on a Notepad file from the desktop, the entire file scrolls by with no pauses. Print lets you get hardcopy of your notes; the printout is formatted to the same line length as your Notepad window. (Remember that before you try printing your huge 2-character-wide note file! hehe) Clear lets you erase Notepad's current contents (yes, it asks if you're sure before doing so). Find... allows you to do search or search-and-replace operations. Choose this option and you'll see a dialog box with spaces for from and to fields, and buttons for find, change first, change all, and cancel. These operations all affect text from the current cursor position to the end of your notes. Copy, Move, and Delete operate on blocks of text. First mark the block, then if you want to move or copy the block, position the cursor at the desired location and choose Copy or Move from the menu; the block will appear at the new location, and if you choose Move, it will be deleted from the old location. Delete simply erases the specified block. Apparently you must use the mouse to mark your block. What's more, it seems that a block can only consist of a single screen line at a time... hardly an ideal situation, but better than nothing. At any rate, left-click on the first character of your block, hold down the left button, and drag the cursor down one line. The marked block will show up as inverse text; then choose Notepad from the Desk menu and click on the desired function. Unselecting a marked block takes some practice. Position the mouse cursor at the first character in the block, hold down BOTH mouse buttons, then move the cursor quickly from left to right over the first character or two and release both buttons. If you're lucky, the entire block will be deselected, but most likely you'll end up with one or two characters still in inverse. Then again, maybe it's just my mousemanship... Notepad seems to work great for the most part, but twice during a full day's playing I've had my system lock up while in Notepad. One time was after I discovered that there were no LFs in a saved Notepad file; I loaded the file, then tried using Find... to substitute ^M^J combinations (CRLFs) for the bare CRs in the file. The mouse pointer disappeared and the keyboard had no effect, so I had to do a reset. Another time I was using Notepad from within Flash, and when I exited back to Flash the same thing happened. Note, though, that my problems may be due to an interaction with one of my numerous AUTO programs or other ACCs... I'll do a bit more testing to try to pin this down, and will upload a revised file if I find anything. Well, those are the basics of Notepad. All in all it's a very handy ACC to have; it's ideal for jotting quick notes while you're in the middle of another program, and it's a serviceable word processor if your needs are simple. Notepad's biggest deficiencies are the primitive block operations, occasional lockups, and the lack of a linefeed, but its convenience may make up for that. Well worth the download time! Bill Aycock