This document describes version 4.1/4.4 of the jstools package.
There's a bug in unpatched Tk 3.6 that causes wish(1) to die with a core dump under certain circumstances; you should apply the official patch to Tk, which is available with the Tk sources on the official Tk distribution sites.
There were focusrelated bugs in Tk 4.0b2 (the second beta release) which caused the jstools applications (and some others) to crash frequently; later versions of Tk do not suffer from this problem.
jabbrevs - an abbreviation manager (used by
jedit)
jbrowser - a directory browser
jdoc - a documentation viewer, which you are presumably using to
read this
jedit - an multimode, multiwindow text editor
jmore - a file viewer, essentially a graphical analogue to
more(1)
jprefs - a tool to set
preferences shared by the
jstools applications
The jedit editor can also be embedded in other Tk applications (and jmore and jprefs are really just wrappers around library procedures, so they can as well). I hope to add this capability to the other applications in the future.
jalert - display an alert panel
jcolname - prompt for a colour name
jcolrgb - prompt for a colour by RGB values
jconfirm - ask user for confirmation
jfs - allow user to select a file
jprompt - ask user to supply a string
jcalendar - a tool to edit and print calendar data in
xcalendar(1) format
jhotlist - a tool to manage hotlists for an old version of NCSA Mosaic
jlaunchpad - a menu of applications and remote hosts, similar to SGI's
toolchest.
jmsgs - a graphical analogue to the Berkeley
msgs(1) command
jnewbrowser - a preview of the appearance of the next version of
jbrowser
jpeople - an addresslist and email alias manager
jperson - a commandline interface to the
jpeople database
jrtgrep - search for a regular expression in a
.jrt or
.jdoc document
For specific information on using or invoking particular applications, see the documentation for the individual application (referenced above under Applications).
In many places in the libraries, I've borrowed code from other people (with permission); they're mentioned in the documentation files for the individual libraries and in comments in the code itself.
Global preferences are saved in the file ~/.tk/defaults, which is in the standard X Windows resource format. (For more information on this format, see X(1), particularly the section RESOURCES, and option(n), particularly the section on option readfile.) Most jstools applications save their applicationspecific preferences in the same format in the file ~/.tk/application-defaults, where application is the name of the particular application, but some may save them someplace else and/or in some other format.
* I intend to make jdoc (at least, and perhaps other applications as well) embeddable.
* I hope to overhaul the Preferences mechanism. I'd like to have some system similar to that in Brent Welch's exmh application, where preferences are organised into categories. I'd like a central preference panel to list the categories, and for each application to be able to add categories, instead of having separate global and applicationspecific panels. Also, I'd like to add an interface for editing all the standard Tk appearance resources, as described in options(n), so users don't have to edit defaults files by hand to adjust fonts, colours, relief options, etc.
* I'd like to add a notecardbrowser application, for typing and searching through lots of short notes - an electronic card file.
* I'd like to add a basic sketching program. (It would be nice if drawings created by it could be included in jedit documents.)
* I'd like to have some of the applications dynamically communicate
among each other. For instance, as soon as you add an abbreviation
with
jabbrevs, it should be available in all your
jedit sessions. Global preferences you change in one application
should be reflected in all your running
jstools applications. And perhaps various applications could communicate
among each other to decide where to put their windows, so windows
overlap as little as possible.