BeTips.net

If you open up the Mouse preferences panel, you’ll see a checkbox called Focus Follows Mouse. If you check this, you’ll no longer have to click inside a window to make it the focus of the operating system’s attention. Windows will „gain focus“ simply by having the mouse roll over them. This does not, however, mean that those windows will come to the front. Therefore, you can actually type into windows that are partially obscured behind other windows.
In R4.5, the Mouse preferences panel has grown a couple of new options under the „Focus follows mouse“ picklist. Enable either of the Warping options and you probably won’t notice a difference right off the bat. But open a bunch of applications and use the Twitcher to toggle among them, and you’ll see what Warping is all about quickly enough.
When you switch to a new application from the keyboard, the mouse cursor will move itself into position over the newly selected app or window. With normal warping selected, the cursor will „glide“ into position. With Instant Warping selected, the cursor will snap into position. Another great way to see the effect of warping is to minimize a window and then restore it from the Deskbar. The mouse cursor will glide from the Deskbar to the restored window.
FFM is the source of great debate: people love it or hate it. For the most part, people who like it have spent many years in the Unix world. My thinking is that if you have to bother to reach out and grab the mouse to activate another window anyway, you may as well click in it. Not everyone agrees. Peter Norby (norby@inktomi.com), for example, offers this counter-perspective:

In my case, a lot of times I’m just nudging the mouse from window to window and am not actually grabbing the mouse per-se, so I don’t want to have to do the extra clicking.
What it’s really useful for is when you want to focus without raising the window. If there were a way with click-to-focus to focus on a window without raising it, then there might be an argument.
Also, speaking generally, it isn’t clear whether the click to focus gets passed along to the app or not, depending on OS/implementation. In the case where it does, sometimes the only area showing of an App isn’t something you want to click on, such as the close button.
But anyways, it probably does just boil down to religious choice 🙂

Roman Filippov (rxf@alkor.ru) adds:
The Terminal shortcut Alt+G to switch between Terminals works only within the current workspace. If warping is on and you have several Terminal windows open on a different workspaces, then pressing Alt-G will instantly bring the mouse pointer to the current Terminal’s title tab. This way, you can hide/minimize/move Terminal windows without extra mouse movements 🙂

If you type

 alert hello

at a Terminal prompt, you’ll get a dialog box with a Cancel button. If you start adding words, as in

alert hello there you

you’ll get a box with several buttons. Phrases should be enclosed in quotes, as in

 alert "Hello there" "What the heck" "is this?"

When you select a button, your selection is returned to the command line as stdout.
What use could this possibly be? See the tip Bootup Fortune for one example, or Alert boxes, part II for another.
This is a great way to introduce an element of interactivity into your bash shell scripts.

Want a quick description of the system you’re running BeOS on? Just type
sysinfo
and Terminal will spit back a bunch of interesting system details. You can
also run
sysinfo -platform
to find out whether you’re running the Intel or Mac version of BeOS (this would be more interesting if you were telnetting into a BeOS machine and couldn’t see the machine right in front of you).

If you’re coming to BeOS from Windows, you might expect to be able to use the keyboard to access the pulldown menus in your applications. But when you press Alt+[the underlined letter] nothing happens. It works a little bit differently in BeOS.
Just hit Alt+Esc to highlight the first pulldown menu. Then you can use the down arrow to display that menu, or the left and right arrows to move through the other menus. Sure as hell beats reaching for the mouse!
Note that if you have a 105-key Windows keyboard, the Menu key (just to the left of the right Ctrl key) functions like Alt does in Windows.

If you launch the Terminal with the -t flag, you can assign a custom name to its title bar. For instance, type
Terminal -t "HappyTerm"
and you’ll get a new Terminal window called Happy Term, rather than the default name „Terminal 2.“
You can also change the title of the currently running terminal with the following sequence:

$ /bin/echo '33]2;My Term07'

Because this is a somewhat hairy sequence, you probably won’t want to type it in with any regularity. In that case, make the above into a little shell script. Save the brief script below in /boot/home/config/bin as a file called „term“

echo -e "33]2;$107"

You’ll then be able to type: term "My Term" at any prompt to change the title of the currently running terminal.

Peter Folk (pfolk@gargtech.com) adds:
The command from this tip wasn’t correctly quoted, so it didn’t make it through the HTML system. The correct command is below:
echo -en '\\033]2;TextInTitle\\007'

[Editor’s note: This tip should no longer be necessary in R4.5, as these strange connection bugs seem to have been worked out. This tip remains for users of older versions of BeOS.]
Some users may encounter a bug that leaves the net_server in an ambiguous state if your ISP times you out — you may find you’re not able to make a new connection properly. This seems to be an especially pernicious problem for ISDN users.
If this happens, you don’t have to reboot. First, look at all your network apps to make sure none of them are currently requesting network services. For instance, if you’ve tried to check your mail and it’s just sitting there not making the connection, stop it, or quit the mail program.
Open the Network preferences panel and click the Restart Networking button. Wait a few seconds, close the Network panel, and try your connection again. You should now be able to fire up PPP normally.
Alternatively, you can restart networking from the command line by typing /boot/beos/system/boot/Netscript. If you have to run Netscript often, you may want to make a symlink to it in /boot/home/config/bin so you just type Netscript from any prompt.

Pasting text into the Terminal is just a mouse click and drag away. Simply select the text (in StyledEdit, e-mail, anything) and drag it into the Terminal. When dragging text out of the app’s window isn’t possible (as with NetPositive or Gobe’s Productive), copy the selected text to the clipboard (Alt+C). To paste it back to the Terminal prompt just hit mouse button 2 or 3.

When an application bumps into BeOS’s memory protection scheme or commits some other offense, a message pops up telling you that an error occured and that the program will be shut down. OK?
Not OK! Don’t click that button right away! Sometimes the program in question will be completely non-functional, and you might as well kill it. Other times, only one non-critical thread of the program has crashed, and you can keep working in the rest of the application.
For example, you can save changes in any still-functioning windows before killing your word processor or graphics app. If the Tracker crashes, and you don’t have a Terminal open, you should launch it before you kill the Tracker, because afterwards you wont be able to! And if you get one of those rare messages telling you that the app_server has goofed up, ignore it and start shutting down your computer and rebooting.

BeOS for Intel can utilize all of your TrueType fonts*. You can, of course, mount your Windows partition and move them over to /boot/home/config/fonts/ttfonts/ . There are also many Web sites that offer tons of free fonts for download. Here are some good starter sites:
Chank
SirSpeedy
Kats-Korner
If you’re looking for some good ones designed expressly for on-screen (rather than print) use, Microsoft has a very well done set of fonts available for free. Download them from http://www.microsoft.c om/typography/fontpack/
However, you’ll notice there are downloads for Win95/NT, MacOS, and Win 3.1. They all contain the exact same fonts, but it’s important that you download the Win 3.1 version. Why? Because BeOS can’t handle the Mac .hqx format, and the 95/NT download is an installer executable. But the Win 3.1 version is just a .zip file, packaged as an .exe. So once you’ve downloaded, drag the .exe into Expander to unzip the fonts.
Verdana is a great font for all your menus, while monospace.com is a great Terminal font.
* BeOS for PPC can use TrueType fonts too, but they must be run through a preprocessor first.

If you open up the FileTypes Preferences panel and select a MIME type (such as the Person filetype), you’ll see a list of all attributes associated with that type in a listbox lower down on the screen. Be doesn’t make it obvious, but if you double-click one of those attributes, you’ll get a detailed dialog with all kinds of options for how that attribute is handled in the system. For instance, you can specify that that attribute is never editable from Tracker — this can provide a modicum of security against tampering (or your own goofs).