In ncurses:
1.What does the A_PROTECT attribute do? Everywhere on the net, the docs just say: Protected mode. What is that?
2.Also I would like to mark the area where the user inputs characters with an underscore, but I would like when the user deletes or backspaces to have the underscore reappear. Is there an attribute that does that, or I have to manually do that?
Protected mode may refer to a little-used feature of some DEC terminals (notably the VT220 and related), called selective erase.
The general idea is that some text can be internally marked as protected. This doesn't change the way it is rendered on the screen, but character cells so marked are not erased by the DECSEL and DECSED (Selective Erase in Line and Selective Erase Data) commands.
This would typically be used to implement something like a data entry form. Field headings and markup would be protected text, and data entered into the fields would be unprotected. You can erase the contents of the form to reset it by performing Selective Erase; thus erasing the data fields but not the headings.
Protect mode is defined by the terminal I'm not sure if it does anything on modern terminals.
There is an attribute "A_UNDERLINE" that underlines a character if your terminal supports it.
For handling input you may want to look at the form library (distributed with ncurses) or cdk (http://invisible-island.net/cdk/)
Related
While using form fields I stumbled upon the following behavior of dynamically-sized fields. AFAICT, passing a right arrow key event to the form driver leads to appending of spaces to the field buffer. I.e., this:
case KEY_RIGHT:
form_driver(f, REQ_NEXT_CHAR);
break;
when the cursor is at the end of the field string will append spaces to the field buffer. I am baffled as to how this is the default behavior. IMHO, hard stopping at the end of the field buffer string would be the correct, intuitive behavior, and spaces should be appended only when the user explicitly does so.
Reading the source code I see this is tied to a compatibility macro(?) called GROW_IF_NAVIGATE? I see this as a prime example of a simple enhancement that allows the user to opt out of this behavior. In the meantime what are my options? Just trim?
EDIT: the behavior controlled by this macro is more bizarre than I originally thought. It only limits growth when moving after the end of the field as specified in the field creation. IOW, when the macro is disabled (0), after filling some part of the field the growth is still allowed until the cursor reaches the end of the field where the growth indeed stops. Trimming is perhaps the only recourse here.
From a cursory reading of the latest source code field navigation is not taking into the account the content of the field. The field buffer can be grown by either navigating to the right or typing in characters (or a combination of both). Navigation adds padding characters which are replaced with blanks when the field buffer is eventually evaluated. The macro GROW_IF_NAVIGATE allows/controls the growth of fields when the end of the field window has been reached.
It seems that the recourse is to either not issue the request to navigate to the form driver, and this requires keeping track of every and all field input, or simply discard all padding, but this invalidates input with trailing spaces.
As a bit of context, I am considering making a plugin for vim that would inline specific debugging and/or profiling information on along the left margin (ideally left of the numbers column) which would need to be 4-5 characters wide. However, I cannot find any means to accomplish this. I've searched around, and the closest thing I can find is vimscript code for inserting signs in the sign column, but the sign column is fixed at 2 characters wide.
I've considered the possibility of making my own makeshift column (to the right of the numbers column, in the normally editable text area) and somehow marking it as readonly, but that doesn't seem possible either- from what I've read, the entire buffer must be readonly or not; you can't have just a portion as readonly.
For completeness here's an example. I would like to programmatically insert a 4-5 character column before some text (with numbers set)
1 Text buffer
2 with some
3 text
to make
My 1 Text buffer
own 2 with some
text 3 text
Is there any way to accomplish this task?
The built-in feature for this is the sign column, but yes it is limited to two characters.
Depending on your use cases, it might be okay to enhance the signs with a tooltip popup (:help balloon-eval explicitly mentions This feature allows a debugger, or other external tool, to display dynamic information based on where the mouse is pointing.), or maybe place the additional information in the quickfix or location list.
Modification of the actual buffer has many downsides (as it effectively prevents editing, and Vim's main purpose is just that). What some plugins do is showing a scratch (that is: unpersisted, unmodifiable) buffer in a vertical split, and setting the 'scrollbind' option so that its contents follow the original buffer. For an example, have a look at the VCSCommand plugin, which uses this for annotating a buffer with commit information.
I am trying to find a way to paste a predefined string upon entering a specific keyboard sequence, on any app.
For example if I have to paste an url or a password into a field, I can have said password in a hidden script and when I press, say, [ctrl] + [5], it would write "example123" on the text field where my cursor is.
Ideally without copying to the clipboard (I'd prefer keeping what I have on my clipboard and also avoiding to paste a password or such by mistake elsewhere).
I have tried every solution I've found so far that include xclip, xdotool and xvkdb. All of them either do not work or are really inconsistent: They only paste the string sometimes, and when they do, it's usually only part of the string ("ample123" instead of "example123").
I thought of using compose key, which I heavily use anyway to write in french on an us keyboard, but it seems it only supports 1 character sequences, as nothing is printed when I modify my .XCompose to include custom output sequences of len > 1.
I am using Ubuntu 18.04 with Gnome as a DE. Ideally something that also works when logging back (like compose keys).
You need to walk the Document Object Model for either Gnome or your web-page. My concern is that with a desktop script you wont be able to access the web page because you will need to be able to establish a target to send string to. I see in your question that you tried using using "x{tool-name}" to grab the text field element. Delivering the sting really isn't the problem. The problem is getting the GUI element of text box pragmatically. The easiest way to get access to this in a user loaded web-page is with WebExtensions API which is how to make extensions for most modern browsers. Otherwise, if you can get away with only having access to Gnome's GUI I would try LDTP, it's a library used for testing, but it looks like it can be used for automation too.
For keyboard shortcuts:
It really shouldn't matter what the script is doing to how you want to activate it. I would just go to Gnome/Settings/Keyboard and set the path to where I saved the script to be the Command. If you go the WebExtension route, you will want to build the shortcut into your extension.
So basically I am trying to rewrite a bash script which uses dialog --radiolist for choosing locale,keyboard,time. At the moment the tag is a number that corresponds to a local (I created a hashtable for it). But because I have, and want to keep it that way for now, around 100 locales it gets messy at the end.
What I wanna achieve is to make it more compact without having to add or add an artificial, non visible item that might easily translate to its tag. (as a tag I would put the locale name)
What I have tried:
1. Noobish thing but I though that there might be some way to include empty like NULL in ASCII or 0, blank space etc, but dialog would always make it visible.
2. Exclude the item at all and finish on on/off but instead on/off takes place of item (not surprisingly if options are as follow --radiolist text height width list-height [ tag item status ])
3. Instead of letting the dialog on exit write to the output the name of the chosen locale I created an output statement myself.
I had red a lot about dialog and whiptail(http://linux.die.net/man/1/dialog, http://linuxcommand.org/lc3_adv_dialog.php) but always end up with having to add tag and an item. Would appreciate any suggestions and maybe some info if there is easily plug-gable dialog/whiptail compatible libs.
Thank You in advance
Perhaps you overlooked the --no-tags option (see manpage):
--no-tags
Some widgets (checklist, inputmenu, radiolist, menu) display a
list with two columns (a "tag" and "description"). The tag is
useful for scripting, but may not help the user. The --no-tags
option (from Xdialog) may be used to suppress the column of tags
from the display. Unlike the --no-items option, this does not
affect the data which is read from the script.
The question mentions whiptail and consistency, which could refer to consistency across dialog and whiptail. There is none, since
whiptail provides fewer options than dialog (inevitably, there will be differences, since there is no one-one mapping possible)
consistency as such between the two is done in dialog occasionally to help with compatibility (the reverse is not true).
Ive been looking though the QsciScintilla API, and I want to know how to set a line in a text editor to read -only. I know it provides a setReadOnly function. But this sets the whole text editor to read-only.
Any suggestions on how to set a line to read-only?
Im using PQT4 Python 3x
You can't really do this. There is a low-level feature in the underlying Scintilla control that can prevent the caret moving into an area of text - but it cannot prevent deletion of a broader area of text that contains a "read-only" part. But even if this was sufficient for your purposes, this feature can only be applied to ranges of styled text, not specific lines.
If you just want to associate some read-only text with a specific line, you could use an annotation.