General Overview

The FileStar Window

FS/2 uses six internal windows that are contained and arranged within the FS/2 variable size frame window. Located immediately below the PM Action Bar pulldown menu, which may be hidden, if desired, since context menus are provided to access all commands, are the following framed windows:

The Toolbar window which may be used to initiate various operations and commands. It also may be removed from the display if desired.
The Drives , Directories , and two Files windows, which are arranged left to right in the variable sized center area, display a list of available drives, treeview(s) of directories of a single drive (or multiple drives) and files in two directories listed in separate containers (Files A and B).
A Data Panel window is located at the bottom of the FS/2 window and displays FS/2 messages, drive data and the cursored file information such as file size, last write date and time and attributes. The current date and time are also shown in separate windows in the format specified by the country code page. Pushbuttons on the Data Panel are used to perform related functions as are left and right mouse button clicks in the panel sub-windows. If desired, the Data Panel may also be hidden by using the F9 toggle key.

The Files windows, referred to herein a Files A and B, are identical in appearance except for colors - which are pale blue (A) and pale yellow (B) by default, commonly called the blue and yellow Files windows by some users. Of course the user may color either Files window to the color of choice. The color of the active Files window is used in both the Drives and Directories windows to assist in awareness of which Files window is active.

The window shown below is one of the few shown within that has been modified to enhance appearance with custom colors and the use of a third-party application to enhance the titlebar. It also is degraded by rescaling and color reduction to a 256-color palette.

The window Titlebar contains a modified System menu, Close and Minimize/Maximize controls. FS/2 adds another control to the title bar, the Swap control. This control reduces or restores the FS/2 window to and from a small, fixed height variable data Swap window that shows the swap file size and other memory information at a user adjustable time interval. The titlebar text includes network status if peer service has been started, showing 'Logged Off' if the user is not logged on or, if logged on, the local domain name.

A RMB click in the title bar will pop up the Title Bar context menu. This menu contains items to access the Windows, Prompts, Setup and Help Action Bar menu items and is provided mainly for use when the Action Bar menu has been hidden.

The six internal windows are the main focus of the FS/2 display. However, FS/2 uses many other dialog windows (generally referred to herein as simply a "dialog") to present information and obtain user input.

See the following related subjects:

The Active Window

Internal Window Sizing

Expanding and Restoring Internal Windows

Resetting Internal Windows

Swap window

Message window

Performance Considerations

The default configuration of FS/2 is based on both display and performance factors.

The display colors and fonts were chosen to be usable when booted to a 16-color VGA desktop. The user is encouraged to adjust both as desired. See Customization .
The directory tree and file views are text only. Adding icons to these views will slow the drive and directory scans by a noticeable factor, especially on lower powered systems. Icon views also take more window space, thereby reducing the number of objects viewable in a fixed size window, add significantly to memory used and may not be draggable due to an OS design fault.

Window Arrangement

The two Files windows have five predefined arrangements (styles):

A style may be easily selected using either the Windows menu, Alt+1 through Alt+5 from the keyboard, Ctrl F11/F12 or LMB/RMB on the Ring Button (lower left of Files windows) to toggle through the ring of styles.

Any of the five styles may be user adjusted in size by dragging a window border. This will affect the selected style only and will be restored as adjusted until reset using one of the Windows menu reset options. A Lock Windows menu option may be used to prevent accidentally resizing of the internal windows. The Twin style should not be user adjusted as it is used for the Directory Compare function.

Note: The internal windows cannot be moved by a mouse drag action. To move a window, the left and/or bottom border must be dragged to the new position.

To reset the active window style back to the default arrangement, hit the Size button in the Data Panel (Ctrl+W). Use the Reset Ring function (Alt+Shift+W) to reset all window styles to the default position.

If the right border of the Directories window is resized by a border drag, the new size is optionally set as the default size for the Directories window and its width is used thereafter when resetting one or all styles.

The Cascaded style is recommended if using the Details view. It allows the largest area for display of files while retaining a 'drag-to-other-window' area in the background window and it is easy to click the other window to activate. Some users prefer the tiled variations as a result of experience with other file managers. These styles are primarily useful only when visually comparing the content of the two Files windows.

Data Panel Scaling

The font dropped on the X: Used (where X: is the current drive) button or subwindow will propagate through the other Data Panel buttons or subwindows. A font dropped on any other individual Data Panel subwindow will stick, making it possible to set a different font in each subwindow or set the font in all subwindows with one font drop.

The Data Panel pushbuttons and subwindows dynamically scale to the font used in X: Used pushbutton and its subwindow. The width of the Name pushbutton/subwindow and the Message window is determined by the size of the other controls. To increase the width of the Name and Message windows, reduce the size of the font in the Data Panel as described above.

The FS/2 window cannot be resized and reduced in width below the point where the Name window width is less than the average font width of about 4 characters.

Focus Control

When the main window is activated by clicking in the titlebar, internal window focus is normally returned to the last active internal window. If Setup->Auto Focus is checked, focus is always set to a Files window when changing drives or directories. To set focus to any internal window, LMB click in the desired window or use the Function keys defined in Keys Help . The latter also contains tab and cursor window navigation keys assignments. Press the Esc key to toggle window focus to and from the main window and the last active internal window.

All dialog windows that FS/2 spawns are child windows of FS/2 and will initially appear on top of the FS/2 window. Those that are not modal - and most are not - may be toggled, using the F9 key, to become a Desktop window. This action pushes the FS/2 window back to the top of the Desktop window order. Repeated use of the F9 key will toggle the owner of the dialog between the Desktop and FS/2. When the Desktop is the owner, the dialog window will appear in the Desktop task list. This action is very handy when running the application maximized while using the Find, Compare and other functions.

Color Tracking

The Files windows are normally configured with contrasting colors (default Files A is light blue and B is light yellow) to aid in recognition of the active window. The Drives, Directories and Data Panel windows will switch content and background color (Data Panel color tracking is optional) with activation of a Files window. Recognition of the active window may be further enhanced by setting a contrasting color for the window border, as shown above, using the OS/2 Color Schemes object.

The program dynamically changes the internal titlebar colors in normal use. See Titlebar Enhancers Effects if you are using a 3rd party titlebar enhancer:

Bright Green - Indicates that directories are displayed in the Files window.
Bright Red - Indicates that multiple directories are displayed in the Files window.
Bright Pink - Indicates that duplicate files are displayed in te Files window.

Bubble Help

There is bubble help available for all the internal windows and controls in the main window. The help can easily be toggled on or off (Ctrl+H) and the delay and display times are configurable. The Toolbar must be displayed for the bubble help to work.

General

See the following subjects for more general help:

Hot Keys

Customization

Functions

Menus

Drive Operations

Directory Operations

File Operations

Settings Notebook

Extended Attribute Support

Extended attributes are fully supported. When copying files or directories to drives formatted with the FAT file system, file and directory names are truncated and converted to upper case as required to meet the '8.3' FAT filename format. Any modified file or directory name is then saved to the fileLONGNAME extended attribute. When copying files from a FAT drive to one that supports extended attributes, the original name is restored using the fileLONGNAME extended attribute. There is also support to create, edit and view extended attributes of any file or directory, including complex extended attributes.

Numeric Units

The Operating System APIs, in most instances, return file and drive sizes in bytes. FS/2 converts bytes into binary units (powers of 2) of kibibytes (KiB) and mebibytes (MiB), where one kibibyte = 1024 bytes, as appropriate for the display of such data and in compliance with evolving standards for applications such as file managers. However, only a single letter abbreviation (K for KiB and M for MiB) is used in FS/2 to save display space. This is non-standard use but is common in other applications. The choice of displaying size data in 'K' or 'M' is made in the Settings notebook, page 2_3 . Some displays, such as drive data, can not be set to display bytes.

Note: To avoid confusion, please be aware that most drive manufacturers list the drive size using decimal units (powers of 10) where one kilobyte - 1000 bytes. A 100 GB drive in decimal size is equal to 93.1 GiB (or 95,367.4 MiB) in binary size.

Limitations

Large File Support - FS/2 is currently compiled with a compiler that does not support a file size greater than 2GB. It is planned to convert the code to the Open Watcom compiler in the next minor update. This will require modification of most of the dialogs as many of them use code peculiar to the Borland compiler. When FS/2 encounters a file with a size greater than 2GB, it will show a file size of one byte. These files cannot be copied or moved by FS/2.
Combined Directories and Files View - FS/2 supports reading either files or directories into a Files window but can't read both into the window. This capability may be added in a future release.
Dropped File Rendering - Dropping a file or directory on most WPS objects is supported. However, FS/2 depends on the drop target object performing the rendering required. If the drop target object application does not do its own rendering, the drop will fail.

NOTE: Sierra HyperStar Software is not committed to making any future changes to this program. However, it has every intention to do so if there is a sufficient user base.

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