DV Commander version 1.7 by William E. Allen [75300,272] Copyr 1989,90,91 by William E. Allen PO Box 834, Howell, MI 48843 WHAT'S NEW? Here is a quick look at what's new and changed in version 1.7 of DV commander. Read this file if you are currently using DV Commander to see how the changes might affect you. Version 1.7 04/15/91 * DIsable / ENable commands Added DIsable and ENable commands to control access to DESQview menus. This can be useful in setting up a turnkey system and with games that insist on using your {DESQ} key. * Execute Command Added an Execute command that will let you run any program in its own DESQview window. This command is very powerful. Please see the documentation for details. * Pre-emptive menus The sub-menus are now pre-emptive. This means that if you press the menu selection letter before the menu has a chance to dis- play, it will execute your selection immediately without show- ing the menu. * Reorganized the manual The manual now has a table of contents and the commands, which were in no particular order before, are now in alphabetical sequence. Version 1.6 01/01/91 * Desq command The Desq command stacks keystrokes that open the DESQview main menu and execute commands from it. You can use this command, for example, to set the DESQview video options, or to use the DESQview menus to change colors. You can also use this command to cause DESQview to switch to another window. Version 1.51 12/01/90 * Justify command You can now optionally add [row, col] parameters to the justify command. The window will be positioned so the row and column are in the upper left corner of the window. Version 1.5 10/03/90 * Name change First of all I shortened the name. Instead of DVCOMAND I have changed the name to DVC. I find the new name to be much more convenient to use from the command line and I found that many people renamed it to DVC anyway. Of course you can always rename the executable file to any name you wish and you will probability want to do this if you have many DVP and batch files that would need to be changed. * DV style menus The "style" of the menus have changed to make them conform to the look of DESQview's own menus. Specifically the frame is now made of solid lines and the title is centered inside the frame like DV's menus and screens. A new form of the description (the first positional parameter on each line of your menu files) can be used to make the selector letter appear on the far right of the description like DESQview's menus. For example the menu line: "D=DESQview Datebook" DA would display in the menu as: DESQview Datebook D A new special line of the form: %menu "Applications Menu" allows you to give a name to the menu. If omitted, the title from the DVP used to execute the DVC MENU command is used as the menu title. * Additional menu parameters Three additional positional parameters, TITLE, EXEC, and MEMORY have been added to those you can specify when defining lines in your menu (*.MNU) files. TITLE lets you override the program title specified in the DVP with any string, up to 30 characters, that you want. This is the title that will show in the DESQview SWITCH menu and in the frame of the window when it is not zoomed to a full screen. The EXEC parameter allows you to override the default program parameter in the DVP. MEMORY, the last positional parameter, gives you the ability to override both the minimum and maximum memory specified in the DVP. These new parameters, along with the DIRECTORY and PROGRAM PARAMETERS parameters, allow a single DVP to be used in varied situations. Since the parameters are positional they can not be omitted except on the right. You can use an asterisk (*) to hold the place of any parameter you do not want to specify. For example if you wanted (for some strange reason) to modify the amount of memory allocated to the DESQview Datebook from the default in the DVP of 64 to, say, 128k and leave all the other parameters alone you would use a line in your menu file something like: "D=DESQview Datebook" DA * * * * 128 where the four asterisks hold the places of the: DIRECTORY, PROGRAM PARAMETERS, TITLE, and EXECUTE parameters. * Menu positioning Previously DVC would always position the menu in the upper right corner of the screen. It will now honor the starting row and column from DVP that executes the DVC MENU command provided the starting row, column is within 1,1 and 19,54. * Spawn command A new command, SPAWN, lets you open any DVP while optionally overriding the DIRECTORY, PROGRAM PARAMETERS, TITLE, EXEC, and MEMORY. Essentially this new command lets you open a program from the command line with exactly the same positional parameters you would specify on a line in your menu file. * Color switch A new command line switch, /C=hh, lets you specify the color that DVC will use. hh is the hex attribute for the color you want DVC to use. It defaults to /C=07. You must set USES ITS OWN COLORS to Yes if you specify this new switch. * Quiet switch no longer needed You no longer need to specify the /Q command line switch to keep DVC from displaying its copyright information on the screen. You can type DVC without any parameters to show copyright and registration information and you can type DVC HELP to show the help screen. * Enhanced mouse support Mouse support has been enhanced somewhat. As before, you must still virtualize the window that is running DVC for mouse support to be enabled. This is because the mouse driver writes directly to the video buffer. The mouse cursor is not displayed until you move the mouse. It is displayed as a diamond just like DV uses but it works differently from DV. When in a menu, clicking on the item that is highlighted executes the item but clicking on an item that is not highlighted only moves the highlight bar to that item. The highlight bar does not follow the mouse cursor as it does in DESQview's menus. The mouse cursor can not be moved outside of the menu window. Clicking the right button acts like the ESCape key closing the menu without doing anything. You can press both buttons to bring up the DESQview menu. * Uses more memory DVC now requires the minimum memory to be set to at least 128k.