#WorkBench Icons
22 messages in this thread
OK folks, here's an inane but frustrating problem:
How the heck do I make the drive icons appear where I want them on bootup??
I like to put my floppy disk, ram disk and hard disk partition icons in a
certain place on the Workbench when I bootup the Amiga, for ease of use.
Even though I do a "snapshot" of the icons in their proper places, they
often come up in weird locations when I boot up!
I have noticed that it appears to make a difference, at least with the
floppy icons, what the order is that they are inserted into the drives. If
neither of the icons shows up in the correct location, I can sometimes make
at least one of them behave by removing both floppies, and re-inserting
one. It seems that the first floppy inserted usually goes to the correct
location unless another icon is already there.
As far as the ram disk and HD partitions are concerned, all I can theorize
is it depends on the order in which they were accessed. Seems that the
icon first mounted appears at the bottom right of my Workbench, and the
others follow vertically in order of use?
This is really driving me crazy…!
+ Phil +
Phil,
Try shift-selecting all the disk icons on the screen before doing the
snapshot. With icons in windows, it is necessary to select all you want to
snapshot.
-larry
Well- I tried selecting everything using extended selection…doesn't work.
Funny thing is, it seems to save where I WANT them to go..because sometimes
if I remove both floppies, the first one I put back in goes where I
snapshotted it, where it wouldn't before. But usually the second one seems
to go someplace randomly. Not to mention the Hard Disk Partition icons.
+ Phil +
Phil,
OK.. well, it was worth a try. I tried it myself, and got similar
problems, sometimes it seemed to work, and sometimes not. The HD icons
seemed to work best, with the floppies and ram: icon being wherever they
felt like being.
Hmm! You would think this kind of thing would have come up before… is
there no solution? Jeez, hate to reposition the dang things every time I
boot up..
+ Phil +
I had a problem similar to this a while back and I think what fixed it
for me was spacing the icons a liitle further from each other.
I think that if even a couple of pixels from the icons' borders overlap
then they don't go back to their position.
Greg
Hmm- that's interesting. I'll try it. I don't think they are overlapping,
since when you pick up and move an icon it seems to me that you can see
when it overlaps if it "blocks out" another icon if you move it too close.
On the other hand, there's "no skin off my teeth" to try it. I'll let you
know..
+ Phil +
Phil,
You can do that sort of thing by saving your Disk.info files after you
do a snapshot. Here's what I do for ram: First I move the ram: icon to
where I want it, then double click the icon and set up the window the way I
want it, then do a snapshot. Then I save the info files on my hard drive
(or startup floppy, I'll use DH0: for this example) in this manner:
copy ram:Disk.info DH0:ramdiskinfo
copy ram:.info DH0:raminfo
— Then, in my startup sequence, BEFORE "LoadWB", I do this:
copy DH0:ramdiskinfo ram:Disk.info
copy DH0:raminfo ram:.info
— You can do the same type of thing with other volumes, in a similar
manner.
– Emb
Hmm…sounds interesting- but aren't the ".info" (by themselves) files just
to define the window that opens up from a disk icon? When I snapshot a
disk icon, the only file that gets updated is the "disk.info" file itself.
What stumps me is, these icons seem to have the information about their
intented position OK, it's just that they don't always go there. Seems to
have something to do with when they're mounted or accessed. As I said to
Larry, on bootup things are often wacky, but sometimes I can take all the
floppies out, and at least the first one I put back in comes back in the
saved position.
+ Phil +
Phil,
The location for the icon is a part of the structure in the ".info" file.
That file has a number of pieces of information, including the imagery for
the file AND the x/y coordinates at which it is to appear. It is possible
to make all of them floating icons with no position (nulls in that place).
In that case, the icon will take the next available opening when it
appears.
……Betty
I think you misunderstood me Betty. I meant the ".info" file, as opposed
to the "[file].info" file. I was under the impression that the "[file]
info" file contained information about where the icon locates itself, if
it's a disk icon, or if it's a file icon, what the filename is, what the
default tool is, stacksize, etc. If it's a drawer icon, it determines
where and what size the window is that is generated by double clicking on
it..and a ".info" file in a directory determines where the icons will
appear in the window, right?
+ Phil +
Phil,
The ".info" file has no information at all about location. It is just a
list of the files in that drawer. When I was writing an article about
icons, I tried hard to make more of that little file, and I just couldn't
seem to do so. You can delete the .info file and it will recreate itself
the next time you call for a directory. It will be identical to the one
you deleted. As I understand it, this little file is an effort to speed up
directories by holding the list in that file. No icon information there,
though. Strange, isn't it, that all of our icon files are "xxxx.info", but
that .info has nothing to do with icons!
……Betty
That IS strange. Can't imagine how they squeeze the names of hundreds of
files into that little thing tho..
'course, I STILL can't get my icons to go where they're supposed to. Sigh.
+ Phil +
Phill, haves you ever looked at one of the .info files? If you type
type >ram:info df0:directoryname/.info opt h
you will get a hex dump of the file, which you can then examine in any text
editor. You will see that most of the file is made up of the ascii
representations of the various file names.
……Betty
Hmm, well , interesting nonetheless. I still wish I had some idea how to
make my icons appear in the right place though.
+ Phil +
As I understand it, you are wanting the disk icons to come up in a
particular place – not the project and tool ones. The default disk icon is
held in ROM, and is a floating icon. Don't think you can touch that. The
Disk.info on your disk CAN be changed. I don't recall the position in the
hexdump of the coordinates for an icon, but they are set relative to the
0,0 position of the window/screen in which they are to open. A long time
ago, I worked all of that out and wrote about it in one of the TRANSACTOR
for the AMIGA magazines. It would have been about the third or fourth
issue, I think. In that article, I gave the exact position, which you
could edit with a file editor, such as NewZap.
……Betty
You mean, with 2.0, I can't just move the disk icon to where I want it to
appear, and (with it selected) choose snapshot from the menu to have it
appear where I want? Hmm… haven't tried it with 1.3, but I might with
2.0… the disk icons all come up on the LEFT… ACK! anti-ergonomic for
right handed mousers. –Eet–
Now, which position are you referring to editing? Can't I just "Snapshot"
the icons, and they will go back to their place? Or are you saying that
certain disk icons are not "snapshotable"?
+ Phil +
Phil:
A couple comments.
a) If your disk doesn't have a "disk.info" file on it, then it will use the
default disk icon, which is a floating icon, and just looks for the next
open slot for disk icons. Those slots seem to start at the top right
corner on the screen, and work their way down. When that get's full, the
system jumps up to the left of the top one, and starts down again (I have
a RAM:, RAD:, VD0:, two HD partitions and three floppy drives, so I can get
well into comun two!)
b) However, if you copy a Disk.info file onto that disk BEFORE it mounts,
you can snapshot that icon to a specific spot. In fact, I copy custom
Disk.info files to my memory-based disks (RAD:, RAM: & VD0:) in my
startup-sequence to do just that.
c) Double-however — if another disk icon is in the same place, or even too
close to the spot you snapshotted, and comes up first, the system will bump
the icon to a new slot to keep them from overlapping.
So, I easily do what you want. Just play around with it a bit.
?|^] Ray Lewis
Ray,
I'm quite happy with the disk icons just floating free. That's why I'd
never bothered to try to make them do otherwise. I was just answering
someone who did want them to stay put in a different place. Hope he saw
your answer, though, because it was well put. Thanks.
……Betty
I presume you realize that you can _delete_ the info file as soon as the WB
has displayed it (from RAM:)…also I don't think you need the .info file
at all. No I don't know of a surefire way to determine when WB will have
displayed the icons, but I have the loadwb fairly early in my (admittedly
long) startup-sequence. I simply delete ram:Disk.info at the end (gotta
save every byte one can….you know "a byte saved is a byte earned".
Victor A. Wagner, Jr.
Well, yeh, I suppose I could add "Delete ram:Disk.info", thus saving 282
bytes in ram:, but then I'd lose that ever-important 22 bytes on my hard
disk, and besides, my startup-sequence takes too long already! <grin>
– Emb