If you do any Web design, you know how important it is that your pages look decent on different monitors running at different resolutions. BeOS Workspaces make this a piece of cake. Just set a few different Workspaces at 640×480, 800×600, and 1024×768. Design your page(s) as normal, then use the Workspaces application to drag NetPositive between them. It’s a heck of a lot easier than toggling resolutions for the entire system.
Adding Replicants to the desktop (or to any application for that matter) can seem easier than getting rid of them — until you know what the trick that is.
On the DeskBar, make sure „Show Replicants“ is selected. Look in the lower left corner of the Replicant for a small red icon. If you have a two-button mouse, right-click that icon and choose Delete. If you have a one-button mouse, hold down Control and Command, then click on it for the same pop-up menu.
Note that as of R4, you can also drag Replicants directly to the Trash!
As you know, attributes associated with files are very important to many BeOS applications and functions. Without attributes, your e-mail messages have no subject or sender, your bookmarks have nothing at all, your people files are empty, and so on. If you need to move files from your BeOS partition to another filesystem, such as FAT, HFS, or EXT2FS, be sure and pack them up with an archiving system that supports BeOS attributes before you do. Right now, that means using zip. Full instructions on using zip for creating backups and archives can be found in this tip.
[Editor’s note: there are two similar but different FileTypes dialogs in BeOS. One (the FileTypes panel found in your Preferences folder) changes associations and settings for system-wide preferences, while the other (the FileType panel invoked when you right-click a file and choose FileType from the context menu) changes preferences for the current file only. The following example uses BeMail as an example, but the principle applies to any FileType on your system.]
Suppose you want to change the application that’s invoked when you double-click on a mail file. Normally, BeMail will be launched, but you want NiftyApp to be launched instead.
What you want to do is set the preferred application for a specific mimetype, in this case text/E-mail.
The steps to do this for PR2 are:
/boot/beos/preferences/FileTypes (via double click, no drop of a mail file on it or via a context menu of a mail file!)
E-mail
Preferred Application: from BeMail to NiftyApp
click Select... and choose NiftyApp from your Apps folder (or whatever the folder is that this application happens to reside in)
Set anyway
Now double-click on a mail file and smile 🙂
Like other OSs, BeOS will let you display a list of files in the Tracker according to certain criteria. For instance, to view all your files alphabetically, click the Name header at the top of the column (you need to be in List view to make this work).
But BeOS goes one better than that by allowing for a sort within a sort. Establish your first sort criteria, then hold down the Shift key and sort by a second criteria. You can, for instance, get a Modified Date sort to appear within your alpha sort.
Killing apps from the command line will just axe threads one at a time. Since the BeOS is aggressively multithreaded, you might have to do a lot of killing before the app finally dies.
Easier is the „Vulcan Death Grip“ Tracker technique. Hold down the right Cmd,opt,ctrl, and shift keys and then click on the App’s icon in the DeskBar. The offending app should die a swift death.
[Editor’s note: On PC keyboard, use Ctrl+Alt+Shift.]
If you want to duplicate an item rather than move it, and you’ve got a single-button mouse, hold down CTRL while you drag the icon to it’s destination. This brings up a context-sensitive menu which, among other things, allows you to place a symlink in the target folder.
This script allows me to look at anything I want under NetPositive from the command-line. I keep this in /boot/home/config/bin/N+here, and use it as a quick means to browse through directory trees.
NetPositive file:// `pwd` /$1 &
Then all I have to do is type:
N+here
to bring up a directory listing in NetPositive.
If this doesn’t work for you, try this instead: #!/bin/sh NetPositive file:$PWD/$1 &
(This last bit thanks to Eide-Goodman
You already know that you can create any structure of files and folders you want under the Be menu (see Customize the Be menu). An easy way to add a little functionality to your system is to create little scripts that do housekeeping chores to the Be menu.
You might want to start by creating a new submenu for your scripts under/boot/home/config/be/. Then you can place text files here that function as scripts. Just be sure the first line is
#!/bin/sh
and that you chmod it executable by typing chmod 755 filename.
I’ve created /boot/home/config/be/__/ (that’s two underscores) to contain the items I use most often, such as NetPositive and BeIDE. Here are two scripts which I use quite often.
#!/bin/sh
NetPositive file:///boot/home/bookmarks.html
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /boot/home/config/settings/NetPositive/NetCache/
As you know, queries are always automatically saved to /boot/home/queries. As of R4, queries will automatically delete themselves in seven days. If you’re constructing a query and want to make sure this doesn’t happen, click the latch in the query interface to access the additional options, and deselect the „Temporary“ checkbox.