[Oberon] Narrow displays

[muller at inf.ethz.ch]

"Michael A. McGaw" <mamcgaw at ameritech.net> wrote:
> I understand your comments regarding 640X480 displays, yet, these are still
> very useful.  I use the revised textframes to which you refer, and this
> helps a great deal.

Philipp Kramer suggested another idea to improve the usability 
of TextFrames on narrow displays.  Since a TextFrame menu is a 
normal text, you could set the cursor in the menu and type a 
CR to move the non-visible part of the menu to the next line.  
With some fancy mousework you can scroll the menu text.

Expanding on this idea, you could edit the initialization of 
the menuH variable in the body of TextFrames.Mod and make it 
double the size of Fonts.Default.height.  This will give you 
a two-line menu.

> I like the idea of a very minimal set of sources; here, I am thinking of the
> file set of the original Oberon system- on of the great virtues of Oberon,
> in contradistinction to other OSes of today is that one can get one's arms
> around it and know it (and therefore expand/extend/adapt it) with reasonable
> effort.

That is the idea of the "basic" Native Oberon system, without any
additional packages like Gadgets.  If you take the Oberon-0
diskette and install only that, you have such a basic system,
which can nonetheless be used for Oberon development work and 
supports Telnet, TextMail and FTP on a LAN or PPP connection.
The sources for that is in Source1.zip.

The basic system includes the Script editor, which allows different
font sizes and has line wrapping, but is still small enough to fit
on the Oberon-0 diskette.  This is the reason why the initial
Native Oberon documentation (System.Text and UserGuide.Text) is
written with Script and not TextGadgets.  If Gadgets would fit
on the Oberon-0 disk, Script could be left out, which would 
simplify the environment somewhat, since it gets rid of one
more editor.

> In this connection, I seem to recall a project known as Straw Hat
> that seemed to have this goal (a common root module set, deriving all other
> versions therefrom).  What has become of this?

It seems to have died down, after starting with much fanfare.
I don't know anything more about it.  As far as I know noone at
ETH was affiliated with the project.

-- Pieter

--
Pieter Muller, Computer Systems Institute, ETH Zurich / MCT Lab, Zurich
Native Oberon OS: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/