Wednesday, March 21, 2007

New in v1.6: Improved Status Bar

This is the first of the posts describing the new features in v1.6 (currently in development). Let's start with the status bar.

The old status bar had indicators for caps lock, num lock and scroll lock. Well now, these were there in the first place because of the boilerplate MFC code -- and not because it was useful in any way. Here is how it looks now: (click to enlarge)

There are now two elements on the status bar, one showing line/character counts/position, and the second showing the number of child nodes of the current node. The text shown in the first element varies depending on what exactly you are doing, like so:

When a node is selected: the number of lines and characters of the text in that node, and the number of child nodes are displayed. The focus must be on the node, like when you've just clicked on it.

When you're editing the text: the current location as a line and character offset. The total number of lines are also displayed. Characters start from 1 for each line.

When text is selected: the number of lines and characters of the selected text is displayed.

When there are no children for a node, the child count area shows "(no children)" and when there is no text, the position area shows "(no text)".

Like it? No? Just leave a comment right here!

3 comments:

CAGS said...

Hi,

I've tried your program and it's great, what i like much is its search function much more better than keynote's: http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html . It even works fine in Ubuntu Linux using Wine, though RTF background font color seem not to work. I've already recommended it to my coleages that use Windows. I think it would be a good idea to add more import / export filters such like html export and treepad lite .hjt file format, and a 'incremental search' feature as seen in Jreepad. Keep the good work :-).

Mahadevan R said...

Hi Carlos,

Yes, import from *.knt and *.hjt file formats will come in a future version. These formats are documented, and there are no technical limitations from The Guide's point of view; it's just a question of time.

Export to HTML is also an interesting feature. I've been working on a prototype off and on, let's see..

Incremental search is a new one. I'll look into it.

Thanks for the feedback.

Mahadevan R said...

Hi again.

I checked out the incremental search feature of Jreepad. It looks exactly the same as the incremental search offered by a standard windows tree control (unless I've missed out something). That is to say, the search can be used to locate any displayed node (collapsed nodes that are not visible do not qualify).

This functionality is available (by default, by virtue of the native tree control used) in The Guide too (any version of it!).