Table of Contents

Name

xrolo - OpenWindows tool to manage notes like a Rolodex

Synopsis

rolo [file]

Description

Rolo is a tool for the Sun workstation which presents a user interface to a simple database of notes in a manner which approximates a Rolodex file. The information in this man page is available, almost verbatim, within Rolo by clicking the "?" button in the control panel.

Each note in your Rolo file is meant to simulate a 3x5 card upon which you may scribble anything you like. You can have any number of cards in your rolodex, Rolo will keep track of them for you. You may browse around through them, create new ones, throw old ones away, search for strings in them, etc.

The buttons in the top part of the Rolo window provide the main controls with which you manipulate your cards. Every button on the control panel has a menu attached which can be pulled up by pressing the right mouse button over that item. The menus provide textual explanations of what the buttons do, as well showing the shift accelerators which may be used with the buttons. Selecting from the button menus is equivalent to clicking the button directly. Herewith is a quick overview of what the buttons do.

ARROW BUTTONS
These buttons move you through the cards. The down arrow moves you to the next card in the file, the up arrow moves you backwards to the previous card. Holding down the Shift key when the down or up button is clicked, or choosing the second menu item, will jump you to the last or first card respectively.
NEW CARD BUTTON
This button creates a new blank card. By default, the new card will be inserted after the currently displayed card. Using the Shift key will cause it to be inserted before the current card.
TRASHCAN BUTTON
This button deletes and undeletes cards from your rolodex. A normal unshifted click on this button deletes the card which is currently displayed. Deleted cards are not lost, they are saved on a stack of deleted cards and may be retrieved any time before Rolo exits. The alternate selections on the menu for the Trash button may be used to undelete any card which was previously deleted. These undelete menu items have pullright menus which will list the first line of all the cards on the deleted stack. You may select any one of these deleted cards directly from the pullright menu and it will re-inserted back into the active list of cards before or after the current card. If you select one of the undelete menu items directly, without pulling right to pick from the list of deleted cards, the card on the top of the deleted stack (the last one deleted) will be undeleted. Using Shift and Control key accelerators when clicking the button will give the same effect. If there are no deleted cards on the stack, the undelete items are marked as inactive. You can rearrange the order of the cards in your rolodex by deleting a card, moving to a new position, then undeleting it. Note that blanks cards containing only white space are not saved on the undeleted stack, they are thrown away.
LIST BUTTON
This button produces an index list of all the cards in your rolodex. The first line of each card is displayed in the window so that you can get a quick overview of all your cards. The card numbers to the left of each line can be used to jump directly to that card with the slider in the control panel. Alternately, the user can click on the desired entry followed by a <SHIFT>-click on the list button (or use the list button menu) to bring up the selected card. The "List Cards Matching Regex" menu entry produces an index list of cards matching the regular expression in the Expression text panel using the selected match type.
FILE BUTTON
This button loads and saves your rolodex cards from and to disk. The default action is to write the current list of cards out to the file they were loaded from (the file name listed in the title bar). You can also reload the cards from that file as-of the last time they were saved. There are also items on this menu which will sort your cards into alphabetical order according to their first lines. By default, sorting is done in a case insensitive manner. The sort mode may be set by selecting the case [In]Sensitive pullright menu or by setting the "xrolo.CaseInsensitiveSort" resource to 0 or 1. Xrolo implements a very rudimentary field sort. Each line in the card is considered to be a field. Pointing and clicking on a selected field before invoking the sort will cause xrolo to sort the cards by the selected field. The last item on the menu, which can only be selected from the menu, will load from or save to a named file. You can select a string in some window to provide the file name, similar to the way the TextEdit tool works. The path you give must be relative to your home directory (a cd to $HOME is done when Rolo starts up). Saving to or loading from a file this way causes that new file to become the default for the regular load and save operations. You will be warned about unsaved modifications to your cards, overwriting existing files, etc.
HELP BUTTON
Displays the information you're reading now and allows you to send mail to me.
PHONE BUTTON
On SparcStations this button can be used to dial a number entered in the expression field or highlighted with the mouse. When selected the "Set Phone Attributes a panel that allows speaker volume adjustment, the entering of a dial prefix and the enabling or disabling of the dial prefix. Phone numbers and dial prefixes may consist of any alpha numeric character, *, # and A comma in the dial string causes the dial routine to pause for 2 seconds before dialing the next character in the sequence. Xrolo supports several X resources used to to control default phone attributes. "xrolo.DefaultVolume" sets the default speaker volume. The volume must be entered as an integer value ranging in value from 0 to 100 where 100 is the maximum gain. "xrolo.UseDialPrefix" accepts a boolean value which enables or disables the use of the dial prefix while dialing. "xrolo.DialPrefix" set the default dial prefix string.
FINISHED BUTTON
This button is used when you are finished
using Rolo. A normal click saves any changes you've made and causes Rolo to close to an icon. Alternate selections will cause Rolo to exit with or without saving any pending changes you've made. Rolo automatically saves any pending changes if SunTools forces it to exit.
PRINT BUTTON
This button is used to print. A normal click causes Rolo to print the current record. Alternate selections will cause Rolo to print all the entries in the current sorted order or set the print command. The default print command is "lpr". A user can customize the default printer command by creating an X resource entry called "xrolo.PrintCommand". The "Print Records Matching Regex" menu entry spools to the print command all cards matching the regular expression in the Expression text panel using the selected match type.
FIND BUTTON
This button searches for a regular expression in your cards. This can be used to find any text pattern which appears anywhere in any of your cards. The pattern to search for may be entered in the text item to the right of the Find button. If, at the time the Find button is clicked, there is an active selection in any window, it will be used as the search pattern instead. Pressing the return key in the search pattern item is equivalent to clicking the Find button. Due to the way the library search routines work, all the text of a given card is treated as one logical line. The main effect of this is that the '^' and '$' operations won't match individual lines within a card, only the text of the card as a whole.
Note: "Regular expressions" are the kind used by egrep(1) , which are not the same as the shell meta-characters.
By default xrolo will do a case insensitive (or "sloppy") regular regular expression search. If soundex search mode is selected, xrolo will try to match an entry which sounds like the expression (e.g. "cuper" will match "cooper"). The default search mode may be changed by selecting "Egrep Regex Match" or "Soundex" from the find menu or by setting the X resource "xrolo.SearchType" to 0, 1 or 3 for EGREP, SLOPPY or SOUNDEX searches respectively.
SLIDER
The slider item on the control panel may be used to select any card directly. Simply drag the bar back and forth until the number of the card you wish to see is displayed to the left of the slider, then release the mouse button.
RESOURCES
Xrolo supports a number of resources which include:

xrolo.TextWidth - set width of text window in pixels.

xrolo.CaseInsensitive - 1 causes xrolo to ignore case when sorting. 0 turns on case sensitive sorts.

xrolo.PrintCommand - text string used to set the default print command.

xrolo.SearchType - default search mode for find. 0, 1 or 2 for EGREP, SLOPPY or SOUNDEX search modes respectively.

xrolo.UseDialPrefix - 1 causes xrolo to use the dial prefix when dialing.

xrolo.DefaultVolume - volume gain for SS1 internal speaker. The gain must be entered as an integer value between 0 and 100 where 100 is the maximum gain.

xrolo.DialPrefix - text string used to set the default dial prefix.

Files

$HOME/.rolo
This is the default filename Rolo looks for at startup, unless a filename argument is provided on the command line. The file pathname given must be relative to your home directory, even if Rolo is executed from somewhere else, because Rolo changes to your home directory when it begins.

Author

Ron Hitchens (ronbo@vixen.uucp, hitchens@cs.utexas.edu)
And
Luis Soltero (luis@rice.edu)


Version 1.0, March 1987
Version 2.0, August 1988

Ported to OpenWindows by Luis Soltero
(luis@rice.edu) November 1990

Thanks to S. Page (spage@sun.com) and Mike Ekberg (mae@sun.com) at Sun for changes and improvements to the original Rolo.

Policy

Rolo is public domain, anyone and everyone is welcome to it. Feel free to give it to your friends (or even your enemies). I only ask that you keep it all together, source included, as posted. Please send bug reports, fixes, gripes, suggestions, etc, to me at the email address above.

[RH 8/8/88]


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