Questions about @Assoc and @FType...

[mathewsdw]

So not really being sure of where to start, I'll start out with what I am ultimately trying to accomplish. Given an extension (such as ".doc"), I would like to determine the the full path\name of the program used to open files with that extension ("C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE", in the previous case).

A "work around" that I've been using for a while is an alias "SStart=`Start %@SFN[%1] %2 %3 %4`, but the problem with that is that the app (Microsoft Word, for example) while it "knows" what the long file name of the file is (it's displayed in the title bar), when you try to save the file to another directory (and/or slightly modified file name) the name that "comes up" in the "Save As" dialog box is the short file name that was used when "invoking" the program, and since I probably more often than not save files to an at least slightly modified new name and/or another directory entirely because the chances of my making a mistake and effectively "destroying" the "original" file are very high, I am effectively trying to copy the file name from the app's title bar (which I really can't read without the "Magnify" app because the font is so small) to the "File Name:" field of the "Save As" dialog box (same comment as for the title bar) .

There would at least seem to me to be two different possible ways of getting that information: "@Assoc" and "@FType". However, I have no clue what the results of "@Assoc" even mean ("Echo %@Assoc[.doc]" -> "Word.Document.8", and a registry search for that "phrase" came up basically nothing at all useful); and as far as "@FType" goes, I haven't yet found any character string that returns anything other than a null (empty) character string. ("echo %@ftype[PerlScriptFile]" copied from TCC docs yields "ECHO is OFF", as do all other things that I could even think of to try; and I really have no clue as to what "PerlScriptFile" either is/means - other than the fact that it has something to do with "Perl Scripting", of course.) So, how can I get what I'm looking for; or is there any way?

Just as "background", what I am really trying to accomplish is get something similar to the "Start" command to fully (i.e., not actually "passing" the short file name on to the application) work with file names containing blanks, which at the moment the "Start" command actually does not do in any shape, manner, or form; rather it just "opens up" an brand-new "empty" TCC session. (Of course, cmd.exe does an exactly equivalent thing so if you want to be "compatible" with that that is certainly "compatible" - although I can't quite resist adding that, in my opinion, being "compatible" with something that is both useless and stupid doesn't quite make sense to me - it won't work in my product because it won't work in their product - even though there's no identifiable reason why it shouldn't work in their product?) And I use blanks (a lot!) basically because of my poor vision; "ThisFileNameIsAllRunTogether" I find a lot less readable than "This File Name Is Not All Run Together".

And, after a lot of thought, I did find a "work around" for the "first half" of the problem, but I found it kind of ugly. Specifically, the alias:

SS*tart=`Start D:\DOS\SStart.btm %@Replace[%=s,/,%@SFN[%1]] %2 %3 %4 %5
%6 %7 %8 %9

But, unfortunately, even that "ugly solution" ultimately doesn't help at all because in the .btm file "SStart.btm", the only way to "start" the required application is to replace the "/" by blanks (@Replace, of course), get the long file name from the passed in short file name (@LFN), and then issue the "Start" command, which, of course, has exactly the same problem as the "Start" command issued from the command line does.

So, if I actually had the full name of the application (program) that should be "started", I could avoid using the "Start" command altogether in the batch file (by invoking the "application" directly; and I couldn't care less if the batch file immediately terminated after the app was started or "stuck around" until after the app closed, but it does the former anyway.

 

[vefatica]

Just as "background", what I am really trying to accomplish is get something similar to the "Start" command to fully (i.e., not actually "passing" the short file name on to the application) work with file names containing blanks, which at the moment the "Start" command actually does not do in any shape, manner, or form; rather it just "opens up" an brand-new "empty" TCC session.

This works just fine to start Excel:

start /pgm "397 006 raw.xlsx"

If you don't say "/PGM" then start thinks the quoted string is the title you want to give to the new TCC session.

 

[mathewsdw]

Vince,

You are, of course, technically correct; and frankly I had pretty much forgotten about it ("/PGM") due to its almost total irrelevancy in this case (and almost every other case that I'm interested in) because it entirely misses the point(s) on two, completely independent, counts:

1. I try to avoid putting things in my path that I don't need to put in my path because it is already 402 characters long (I just looked, and that is without the "Path=" part), and that is completely using short file names in the path (I have .btm files to both convert long file (directory) names in the path to short file names and vice versa - the Path variable, with long file names, is currently 526 characters long; while I was just typing the previous I remembered that I had that .btm file), and having to type "Start /PGM "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE" filename" is really somewhat inconvenient (while I "appreciate" the "/PGM" parameter, I'd really not to have to use it).

2. I don't want to have to think about/even remember what application is needed to "deal with" the file; I want things to work exactly like they do when you double-click on a file icon in Windows Explorer.

But thank you!

- Dan

P. S. And I have no doubt whatsoever that it is technically doable since the Windows GUI does it; the question is purely how to do it in TCC.

 

[David Marcus]

Vince is correct that you should use "start /pgm". But, to answer your other question, try

echo %@ftype[%@assoc[.doc]]

When I do this, I get

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE" /n /dde

Windows stores all this stuff in the registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT or HKCU\SOFTWARE\CLASSES.

 

[vefatica]

I don't want to have to think about/even remember what application is needed to "deal with" the file; I want things to work exactly like they do when you double-click on a file icon in Windows Explorer.

Do you have my SYSUTILS plugin? If so, try SHELLEX. It uses ShellExecuteEx on the file you name. It's default action is "open". I believe that's exactly what Explorer does whem you 2-click something.

 

[mathewsdw]

Thank you Dave, you of course were exactly correct. (As you might have guessed, I really had no idea @Assoc and @FType did; and I wasn't able to determine what they did by "experimentation" either; @Assoc returned a string that was totally meaningless to me, and I could not get anything but a null string from @FType because I had absolutely no idea of what even the "nature" of its parameters was. Rex, while this no longer matters for me, of course, you might want to improve (your generally excellent!) documentation just a little bit to define exactly what "the file association for the specified extension" and "the open command string" are because your documentation clearly expects that people who read it will know what those are and I, of course, had no idea whatsoever; and while I have very bad memory, I don't really think that I'm stupid.

And Vince, yes, I have your SYSUTILS plugin, but I had no idea it could do that (and neither did Dave, apparently) but that's simply because Take Command/TCC have so many capabilities that I wonder if anyone other than Rex really comprehends the "full set" of them. (I actually managed, after many years of trying, to convince a close friend of mine to buy Take Command/TCC recently, and he told me after he bought it that there was "so much stuff there" that it was kind of overwhelming and he really didn't know where to start.) And when you add the capabilities of all of the plugins (and I have every one of them that I'm even aware of; and I check that "page" on this website out rather frequently) what was already overwhelming becomes even more so; particularly for somebody with very poor memory, as I have. (The primary reason that I'm able to use Take Command/TCC at all is because it generally has a very good "help system", and if I have even some idea of what I'm looking for, I can generally find it, and rather quickly.) But since I now have the "problem" completely solved (with a Function and an Alias), I'm not really going to take the time investigate "SHELLEX" any further, put simply because I am so slow (because of my bad memory) and have so many projects "on the fire" (more than 50!, at last count; most of them being "crutches" of some kind or another to help me "compensate" for my bad memory and/or general incompetence possibly due to same), I'm not going to take the time to "investigate" things I really don't need in any detail because I don't want to waste the time to do that given I'll probably not remember it anyway. But thank you, too!

 

[David Marcus]

you might want to improve (your generally excellent!) documentation just a little bit to define exactly what "the file association for the specified extension" and "the open command string"

See the help page "Windows File Associations".

but I had no idea it could do that (and neither did Dave, apparently)

As we said, you can just use "start /pgm" or just type the name of the file.

 

[mathewsdw]

Dave, first I will preface this with a reminder that, probably because of my memory loss, in particular, I am quite slow and probably somewhat stupid.

So, yes, that page does, in fact, say "The ASSOC command modifies or displays the associations between extensions and file types in the Windows registry. The FTYPE command modifies or displays the default command used to "open" a file of a specified type.". I'm pretty sure that at some point along the line I had at least glanced at that page and what the previous doesn't say is exactly what a "file type" is (rather stupidly, I suppose, I had no clue that such a thing as "file types" even existed; in my mind "file extension" went directly to "program used to open a file with that extension" although the "mechanism", as actually implemented, does make total sense in hindsight), and I clearly either didn't notice or didn't remember the relationship between the two. However, I had never tried (probably stupidly, I suppose) to run the "FType" command, but only tried to use the "@FType" function, which produces no output at all when fed a "non-existent" "file type", and, again, since at that point I had absolutely no concept of what a "file type" was, I couldn't figure out what to "feed" the "@FType" function. And reading the previous did "remind me" (assuming I had ever noticed it at all) about the "FType" command, which I then had no knowledge/recollection of (vs. the "@FType" function), and running that command does make everything clear (at least in hindsight I suppose given my stupidity). So I will say again, this time with somewhat less emphasis, that maybe that that "final destination" could be made a little bit more clear in the documentation by explicitly mentioning that "%@FType[%@Extension[extension]]" will "produce" the "desired" end result - the full name and path of the program used to "handle" files with that extension. So maybe Rex doesn't need to "upgrade" the documentation to please one particular (stupid) user.

As we said, you can just use "start /pgm" or just type the name of the file.

Dave, I really don't know where you're "coming from"/"trying to go" here. As I've said previously, "/pgm" was not something that I was even slightly interested in, even in principle; and doing `Start "A Sample Word File.doc" just "produces" a "new", completely empty, TCC window; and what is even the point of that other than that cmd.exe does an exactly similar (and similarly, totally stupid and useless) thing? And further, given the total uselessness and utter stupidity of what the "Start"command does do in that situation; "defaulting" to "%@FileType[%@Assoc[%@Ext[filename]]]" would make complete sense to me without having any "downside(s)" whatsoever. (In the I think rather unlikely case that you actually did want to open a file with a program other than that "suggested" by the file's extension, the "/PGM" parameter is a good , "noninvasive", way of doing exactly that.) "Emulating" stupid and useless behavior to be 100% compatible? If it had at least just given me an error message of some kind, that alone might have been enormous help. (And I'll add here, somewhat humorously to me, that "/PGM" isn't even needed; `Start "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE" "A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc"` works just fine!)

- Dan

 

[vefatica]

(And I'll add here, somewhat humorously to me, that "/PGM" isn't even needed; `Start "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE" "A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc"` works just fine!)

That's not humorous; it's quite expected. Either of these would have worked equally well:

START "garbage" "A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc"
START "" "A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc"

Quite simply, unless told otherwise START uses the first quoted string as a ***title*** (the help makes that clear). WINWORD runs because that command (yours or mine) starts a DOC file. No doubt in both cases, the suggested title is ignored.

So while you didn't use "/PGM" you did use a useless 56-character string.

 

[David Marcus]

And, to add to what Vince said, these also both work (both in a btm and from the command line):

"A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc"
start /pgm "A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc"

 

[David Marcus]

(In the I think rather unlikely case that you actually did want to open a file with a program other than that "suggested" by the file's extension, the "/PGM" parameter is a good , "noninvasive", way of doing exactly that.)

That's not what /pgm does.

 

[mathewsdw]

Guys, there's several things going on here. For one thing, while I certainly understood that "Start" with no parameters would just start another TCC session; just supplying what was going to be taken as the "title" of the TCC session was not, as it turned out, to me, "starting with no parameters"; although that does explain exactly what was happening in my case and I was therefore not completely stupid. You see, the title bars of my TCC windows say (and I quote) "PID 7592" (or whatever the PID for that session happens to be, of course), and have "said" that for a very long time because, simply put, I need to know what the PID of any given TCC session is (and why other people don't need to know that I neither know or care), so the value of that parameter was and is not showing up in the title bars of the TCC sessions that I start. Now, I will note here that while exactly the same thing happens in cmd.exe, of course, I wouldn't have had any way of knowing that because for me for some reason, a cmd.exe "session" when started from the command line always has its title bar entirely obscured by the window of the "Magnify" app that I need to run, so I never would have seen that. (I will note here, that because I virtually never use the "close" button on either TCC or cmd.exe (I exclusively type the "Exit" command; I can type quite well and generally pretty much entirely ignore the Windows GUI except for task-switching due to my vision "issues"), I would have had absolutely no reason to have ever seen that in the cmd.exe window unless I temporarily "moved" the "Magnify" app window "out of the way" to un-obscure the cmd.exe window title bar (since the title bar is not visible, I obviously can't grab it); do whatever I needed to do to the cmd.exe windows using the title bar, and then move the "Magnify" app window back up to the top of the screen where it "belongs". Quite a bit of pain for absolutely no gain (I really don't need to see the cmd.exe window's title bar), so I had never bothered to do that before. (And when I "start" a TCC session, exactly the same thing happens except that the title bar of the new "TCC" window is only about halfway obscured. I have absolutely no idea why that happens in either case; and frankly, again I really don't care.) But, of course, that would make my opinion vs. "stupid and useless behavior" invalid because, of course, I had absolutely no evidence for what the actual behavior really was.

I'll also add here that my vision issues are absolutely not a joke; even after you told me that that was the case it probably took me about 5 minutes to find that information in the docs to verify that fact for myself. (I actually had to "select" all of the text on the "help" page, "copy" it (Ctrl-C), and "paste" it (Ctrl-V, of course) into a Notepad document from where I could do a "Find" command. I've never been able to figure out how to effectively do a "find" for a help page on that help page, but I tend to think that that is because it can not be done given that the Windows "help engine" doesn't support it (a real limitation of that program in my opinion, but "Oh, well!")

As far as "A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc" working; yes it does, but #1. I really don't have a clue as to where that is even documented, and #2 and even more importantly, "file-name completion" does not work at all when the name of the file you are trying to "complete" is not a directory nor directly the name of an "executable" (".exe", ".btm", ".bat", etc. etc. etc. ) file; hitting the tab key yields absolutely no results at all (except, again, for directories/executable files whose names "match" what is being "tabbed" on), and since I virtually always use very long file names (with blanks) because of my memory issues (otherwise I wouldn't necessarily have a clue as to the nature of what's in any given file), that is a significant "limitation" for me.

And a similar thing is the case for the "/PGM" parameter. The documentation says, and I quote, "The quoted string following this option is the program name. Any additional text beyond the quoted string is passed to the program as its parameters, so to use other START switches you must place them before /PGM which must be the last option for START. You can use /PGM to allow START to differentiate between a quoted long filename and a quoted title for the session." Nowhere does it state there that a "program name" can actually be a "document name". So your comment that "That's not what /pgm does." is somewhat irrelevant to me since the docs clearly do not say, in my opinion, what "/pgm" actually does do.

And, forgive me for the "stupid" question, but why didn't anybody just say that in the first place? "Alias SStart=`Start "" %1` is clearly a lot simpler than:

Function RawAppName=`%@FType[%@Assoc[.%@Ext[%@UnQuote[%1]]]]`

and

AppName=%@If[%@Index[%@RawAppName[%1],/] == -1,%@RawAppName[%1],%@Trim[%@Left[%@Index[%@RawAppName[%1],/],%@RawAppName[%1]]]]

and

SS*tart=%@AppName[%1] %1 %2 %3 %4 %4 %6 %7 %8 %9

- Dan

 

[Charles Dye]

For whatever it's worth: I find the START command useful for a whole lot of things (not just commands, but document files and directories, too), but I've never had much of a use for the "title" parameter. So I just:

alias s=start /pgm

That gives me a nice convenient one-letterism which does what I expect.

 

[Charles Dye]

I'll also add here that my vision issues are absolutely not a joke; even after you told me that that was the case it probably took me about 5 minutes to find that information in the docs to verify that fact for myself. (I actually had to "select" all of the text on the "help" page, "copy" it (Ctrl-C), and "paste" it (Ctrl-V, of course) into a Notepad document from where I could do a "Find" command. I've never been able to figure out how to effectively do a "find" for a help page on that help page, but I tend to think that that is because it can not be done given that the Windows "help engine" doesn't support it (a real limitation of that program in my opinion, but "Oh, well!")

If the contents pane is focused, Control-F brings up a (primitive) search dialog.

If the contents pane is not focused, Control-F makes an error sound; in which case F6 moves the focus, and then Control-F brings up the primitive search dialog.

 

[David Marcus]

since the title bar is not visible, I obviously can't grab it

Alt+Space should open the system menu in the title bar, even if it isn't visible. Then press "M" to select "Move". You can then move the window using the cursor keys.

As far as "A Word File With Blanks in Its Name.doc" working; yes it does, but #1. I really don't have a clue as to where that is even documented,

It is standard Windows behavior, same as clicking on a file. It is documented on the Take Command Help page "Windows File Associations", the same page I mentioned earlier in this thread.

#2 and even more importantly, "file-name completion" does not work at all when the name of the file you are trying to "complete" is not a directory nor directly the name of an "executable" (".exe", ".btm", ".bat", etc. etc. etc. ) file

From the "Filename Completion" Help page: "If you need to complete the name of any other file at the start of the command line, press Space before starting to type the name. Filename completion will then match any name, not just directory and executable names. Note that you can also "execute" files whose extension has an association in the Windows Registry, but such files are not considered executable by TCC, and only the method above using a space will work."

If you want filename completion to work without typing a space for a certain extension, you can set up an executable extension for TCC. But, I usually just type a space.

Nowhere does it state there that a "program name" can actually be a "document name". So your comment that "That's not what /pgm does." is somewhat irrelevant to me since the docs clearly do not say, in my opinion, what "/pgm" actually does do.

That's the Windows File Associations feature that has been a part of Windows from the beginning (and the Mac had it before that when DOS didn't). Instead of running a program, you can run any file, as long as Windows has a file association for it. That's why you can click on a file to "run" it. Windows finds the app that is associated with it, runs the app, and passes the filename as a parameter.

And, forgive me for the "stupid" question, but why didn't anybody just say that in the first place? "Alias SStart=`Start "" %1` is clearly a lot simpler than:

Vince and I did. Vince said, "If you don't say '/PGM' then start thinks the quoted string is the title you want to give to the new TCC session." I said, "Vince is correct that you should use 'start /pgm'." I think it is clearer to use "/pgm" than to use an empty title. But, either will work.

 

[mathewsdw]

So, as usual, going through these things one by one:

If the contents pane is focused, Control-F brings up a (primitive) search dialog.

If the contents pane is not focused, Control-F makes an error sound; in which case F6 moves the focus, and then Control-F brings up the primitive search dialog.

Charles, that's certainly good to know, and I obviously didn't know it. But, just out of curiosity, where is that documented? I'm pretty sure that Rex is just using the standard Windows "help engine", but I have no idea where that would be documented. (When I don't see any "obvious" documentation for something, I tend to assume that that is because it doesn't do anything that isn't obvious in its user interface, and the previous certainly isn't obvious (at least to me).

Alt+Space should open the system menu in the title bar, even if it isn't visible. Then press "M" to select "Move". You can then move the window using the cursor keys.

Dave, while I have no doubt that that is true, since I don't use the Windows GUI any more than I absolutely have to (it's not that I dislike it, its just bad vision again), and between the fact that I can type reasonably well and the fact that TCC is pretty much sufficient for all of my needs, I wouldn't have known or cared. Typing "Exit" is all I want or need. (The only reason I was getting into cmd.exe in the first place was because I was comparing its behavior to TCC's behavior re. the "Start" command, and as I said, they behaved identically in the situation as described because I hadn't read the documentation thoroughly enough to understand what was going on and what was going on was effectively "invisible" to me.

Guys, I think I've just decided at this point not to keep going through these things one-by-one. The simple fact of the matter is that between my bad memory and my bad eyesight I'm really not all that competent anymore, and effectively just rather stupid. So, while I definitely very much appreciate the information when I ask a question, telling me where it is is/was and essentially asking me why I didn't see it is effectively a waste of both yours and mine time - I didn't see and I won't see it because I'm already as slow as a sloth and taking the time to examine things in that much detail is something I really don't have the time to do and live my life (although I'm not saying that I don't appreciate you telling me where it is, particularly since that provides me with an incentive to take the time to actually read it in detail; I am saying that just because it's there doesn't mean I saw it or remembered it even if I did see it, that's why I've go a "tips" file I keep around to have something to look at to remind me of things like this that I'm likely to forget). But yet this stuff is very important to me because without this computer and this command processor (and also my cell for for somewhat similar but different reasons) I would, simply put, have to be institutionalized as of this moment. (I went to lunch with a friend Friday, where I was describing all of the "projects" I've been working on lately and what I was trying to accomplish with them; and her comment was that it was a good thing that I was so competent with this machine (I don't think she fully realizes just how much less competent I am than now than when I worked with her 15 to 20 years ago), because without it, again I would probably have to be institutionalized because, also again, I wouldn't be able to live on my own.

But, as always, thank you. I really appreciate your help.

- Dan

 

[David Marcus]

But, just out of curiosity, where is that documented? I'm pretty sure that Rex is just using the standard Windows "help engine", but I have no idea where that would be documented.

The Take Command Help says, "The TCC help system (tcmd.chm) uses Microsoft's HTMLHelpViewer (HH.EXE) included in all versions of Windows." Microsoft's documentation is far from perfect, but if I run the Windows Vista Help and enter "Help Viewer", the first result displayed is "Keyboard shortcuts". Clicking on this gives a page that includes "Windows Help viewer keyboard shortcuts". This lists Ctrl+F.

 

[Charles Dye]

Charles, that's certainly good to know, and I obviously didn't know it. But, just out of curiosity, where is that documented? I'm pretty sure that Rex is just using the standard Windows "help engine", but I have no idea where that would be documented. (When I don't see any "obvious" documentation for something, I tend to assume that that is because it doesn't do anything that isn't obvious in its user interface, and the previous certainly isn't obvious (at least to me).

Control-F is a common hotkey for "Find", but where you would find F6 documented is a mystery to me. I only know about it because another limited-vision user informed me. So now I pass the secret on to you.

 

[mathewsdw]

Thank you for the information, guys, but I'm laughing as I type this, and for several reasons.

Dave, you said:

The TCC help system (tcmd.chm) uses Microsoft's HTMLHelpViewer (HH.EXE) included in all versions of Windows.

But I had previously said:

I'm pretty sure that Rex is just using the standard Windows "help engine", but I have no idea where that would be documented

So I clearly pretty much knew that.

So there are several issues here:

Since I just tried it now; it was as I remembered it to be: glacially slow. (I had a "discussion" about this just yesterday at lunch with a group of friends. While I absolutely would not call this machine slow "on the whole" (maybe because I use a RAM disk?), there are some things where it is truly almost amazingly slow.) I just hit the F1 key on the Windows desktop (and, of course, I had to go through and minimize all of windows one by one first because I virtually never "minimize" a window, why would I? - and please don't bother to remind me here that right-clicking on the task bar brings up a pop-up menu that contains "Show the desktop" as I didn't (not at all surprisingly) remember that that was the case until I started typing this (bad memory, of course) - and, as I have previously said, I pretty much don't use the Windows GUI at all except for "Alt-Tab" (my "Start Menu/- Programs" menu is two and a half columns wide at the moment (I just looked; and in a very small font, of course) which I couldn't care less about because I absolutely never use it) and is that even using the Windows GUI? - its probably been years since I've done anything directly using the GUI in some way (other than purely really occasionally) - I am 99.99% a pure "keyboard" person) - there are currently 27 of them "open" on my machine at this moment - including 5 Take Command Windows (I'm not going to bother to count the number of TCC sessions in each window) and 6 Firefox windows (I tend to not close a browser window until I am pretty much absolutely sure that I'm not going to need whatever it's "looking at" any more, and when the FireFox "tab" bar gets 5 or so tabs in it I open up a whole new FireFox window because above that number the tabs "shrink" horizontally enough that I can no longer reliably read the captions), 9 "Notepad" windows, 3 Microsoft Word "sessions", 3 Excel spreadsheets, and the last one a GUI app that I wrote quite a few years ago and use on a fairly regular basis (since I wrote it myself in C++ I had complete control over the sizes of such things as fonts, so that's not a problem for me) this is because, simply put, when I start a new "task" that I know that I am not going to immediately finish and/or get exactly right from the outset (which almost always will be the case, of course!!! :) ), I open a new Take Command window to both let me know where I left off if I get "distracted" (almost guaranteed to happen because of my slowness) and the fact that each TCC window has its own "history" which to say that I use a lot would be quite an understatement; and I'll add here that when I am "developing" a new .btm program I "run through" the "commands" that will be in the .btm file until I get them right; I then write the TCC "history" out to a file, sometimes "piping" to the Windows "Find" command one or more times in a row to "eliminate" things I know are going to be irrelevant before I start; and the final "destination" is a .btm file that I then go into and edit (using Notepad, of course) to "massage" so that the final "result" contains what I want (with the right parameters) and doesn't contain the stuff that I don't want), and it took 1 minute and 23 seconds for the "Help and Support" dialog box to "pop-up" (I knew something like this would be the case in advance so I timed it)), the font is so small (for me) that I am absolutely dependent on the "Magnify" app, and my previous experiences with it were such that it wasn't a very good "source of information" anyway (if I need "help" on something, I almost always just use Google), and, again, I had no reason to expect that the Windows "help engine" did that (since there were absolutely no "visible" indications of it), so why would I have even looked? And, other, strongly related points - I use the "menu structures" of Windows apps almost exclusively - because I'm familiar enough with it for every app that I regularly use so I really don't have to be able to "read" it any "detail" to "remind" me of what menu options I'm looking for and the fact that I'm able to use it entirely from the keyboard ("Alt" key); and, as I'm pretty sure I've previously indicated somewhere along the line in this - I absolutely do not do things requiring control-key "sequences" other than "Crtl-C", "Crtl-X", and "Ctr-V" and I never have (always bad memory to some degree?) - this is why I absolutely do not and never have used editors that required control-key sequences of some kind for their "commands"; "eMacs" (I think it's called, which I rather quickly "abandoned") is the only editor other than Notepad, Microsoft Word, and the editors built-in to programming "environments" such as Visual C++ that I have even used in more years than I can remember (15? 20? more?); the only exception to this because it's completely irrelevant being IBM's mainframe program "SPF" ("Structured-Programming Facility", as I remember), the other "mainframe" editor that IBM offered (under the operating system IBM called "VM" ("Virtual Machine") I also found pretty much unusable (I no longer remember its name or exactly why since that's probably been 20 or more years ago) so I either "opened" up an "MVS" "sub" operating system under VM or started SPF directly under VM - although my recollection is that SPF did not run directly under VM), so at any rate, the only really practical way I have of reading most "help" pages in any "detail" anyway is to select all of the text on the page, copy it, and paste it into a waiting "Notepad" document where I can use a 20pt. font; and, of course, Notepad has a (rather lousy but still basically "usable") "find" "command".

And, another point that I am running into now: When I am typing into any window in any app (such as now) the "Magnify" app becomes essentially totally useless - it does not "follow" the keyboard "insertion" cursor, it strictly "follows" the mouse pointer, which, put simply, I try to keep out of the way of what I'm typing. The reason I survive is because I either use large fonts (16pt. is pretty much the minimum anywhere, ever, and I often do go up to as high as 24pt.) and/or "screen magnification" available in the app (such as FireFox - 5 "hits" of the Ctrl+ key, I just counted) - the limitation there is that as the magnification goes up the total area of the screen that you can see at one time of course goes down, so the magnification level is "limited" by how much of the screen I have to actually see at one time to "function" effectively - in this case to keep the whole width of this "input field" visible on the screen at one time).

And, I think this is a bit of a (sadly? but definitely!) humorous aside; as of this moment I have 57 active programming projects "going on" (I know this because I keep everything "I'm in the middle of" on my RAM disk and I wrote a .btm file sometime back that will very quickly (as in about a second) go through all of the source files on my RAM disk (it ignores source files with either "-1", "-2", "+1", "+2" and similar in their names as well as source files that have a date (and possibly time) stamp in their name (".V2011-18-18", for example) and "count" them), 4 of them C++ projects and the remaining 53 of them are TCC .btm files), 3 of them (I really didn't examine the list closely (and long) enough to necessarily get an "exact" count) having to do with my finances in some way or another (since my entire income is from Social Security Disability, which ain't that much, I'm pretty much "living on the edge"), the remainder of them being a "crutch" of some kind or another to either aid me re. my bad eyesight or (more likely) bad memory.

If there's anything more to add here (and I really don't know if there is) I've already forgotten it. :)

- Dan

P. S. This took me 3 hours and 37 minutes to type - I also marked down the start time (in a Notepad "document") so I would have that readily available to mention - and I did not get "involved" in anything else while I was typing this other than maybe a minute or two once in a while to "verify" one of my "facts". As I've said, I am glacially slow.

P. P. S. And as I'm also pretty sure that I've indicated previously, that's because of my basic incompetence. The number of spelling mistakes where I use the wrong word spelled correctly (as in "Oh, dear" to use a humorous example), or even use a word that has nothing at all to do with anything in that particular context (????) - I just spotted and corrected one of those in the last 30 seconds; and I no longer even remember what the word was!!!! - and yet another one (actually, as of this moment, four, because I continued the proofreading process after I had said "one") after I entered this parenthetical that was because I started to "say" something one way or another and decided instead after looking at ti to say it another way but didn't "remember" to take out the words/phrase that I had "originally" entered), grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, the word-order mistakes, leaving out words, whole sentences, and sometimes "forgetting" even whole paragraphs that I feel I really needed to "convey" something that I really wanted to convey, is almost incredible. If you don't see that, it's only because I've "proofread" this well enough that it didn't actually make it into the final "results"; but a slow, agonizing, processs.

P. P. P. S. And when I see an error in the "preview", it can take me two to three minutes to actually find it in the text of the positing because I almost immediately forget what the "context" of the error was.

P. P. P. P. S. And I'm not looking for "sympathy" here; just stating the "facts". You might find this kind of odd or even amazing, but I am not at all an unhappy person (why I could laugh as I typed this and why I am laughing now). That is simply because what I consider to be the most important "aspects" of my life are going supremely well, and while all of the previous is a big aggravation; that's all it is, a big aggravation.