Xconvers User Guide: Xconvers usage

Next Previous Contents

## 2. Xconvers usage

## 2.1 Main window

The main xconvers window is divided into 4 parts: the menu, the receiving window, the one-line transmit window and the statusbar.

Figure 1. Xconvers main window

Menus can be selected by using the mouse or the Alt-key. The program can be exited by clicking on the close button or selecting File(Alt+F)->Exit from the menu. The Host(Alt+H)->Open menu entry will be automatically disabled when you are connected. At the same time Host->Close is enabled. You can use the PgUp/PgDn keys to scroll the receive window. Settings(Alt+S)->Preferences will show a dialog for xconvers settings and Help(Alt+P)->About will activate the about dialog.

The receive window will use a different color for every new user with a maximum of 10 colors. Status messages (messages starting with ***) will be displayes in red, sent messages will be white and non-user messages will be somewhat greyish. Colors for user 1 to 10 will be in yellow, green, blue, magenta, orange, cyan, purple, DarkKhaki, DarkCyan or DeepPink. Private message (messages send to you with the /msg comand) will be displayed in pink.

The one-line transmit window remembers the last 10 lines you have typed. You can recall them by using the up- and down-arrow. These lines will be saved if you leave xconvers and reloaded the next time you start the program.

The bottom status bar will show the host you are connected to and will display any failures, like a hostname which can not be resolved or a connection which is refused. When the statusbar is disabled, these messages will appear in the receive window prepended by an arrow (-->).

## 2.2 Open dialog

A connection is opened by selecting Host->Open.

Figure 2. The open (connect) dialog

This will show the open dialog, with 2 entries for hostname and port. The entries will be filled with the last connection you have made. The last 10 connections are available when you click on the down-arrow. When nothing is entered and the entries are blank, the default values will be used and a connection to localhost, port 3600 will be tried.

## 2.3 Close dialog

The close dialog closes the socket which you have used to connect to the convers server.

Figure 3. Close (disconnect) dialog

Of course, you could close the connection by typing /quit, but there is a possibility that the remote server has already closed the connection. Typing /quit will let you wait forever for a server response. There is one disadvantage when closing the socket: the convers server will think there is a link failure. So, if you are sure that you are connected, it is best to just use the /quit command.

## 2.4 Preferences dialog

The preferences dialog, activated by selecting Settings->Preferences from the menu, can be used to change general settings and appearance of xconvers. The dialog consists of 2 pages, called General and Display. Your preferences will be saved in ~/.xconvers/preferences when you click OK and will be recalled the next time you start xconvers.

Figure 4. Preferences dialog (general page)

The General page has 2 checkbuttons, one for enabling logging to a file, the other one for enabling autlogin. The log is saved in ~/.xconvers/hostname.log). Please note that if you have 2 instances of xconvers running and are connected to the same host, both programs will log to the same file. If you click on autologin, you can fill in a name and channel which will be used to automatically login to a convers server, by sending /n name channel) the first time you connect.

Figure 5. Preferences dialog (display page)

The Display page is used to change the appearance of xconvers. Menu, scrollbar and statusbar of the mainwindow can be disabled, by clicking on one of the checkboxes. The background color of the main window can be changed by clicking on the colored button in the color frame (this button will be black the first time you change the background). This will bring up a color selection dialog. Likewise, clicking on the button marked ... in the font frame will bring up a font selection dialog for changing the font of the main window.

## 2.5 About dialog

The about dialog, displayed by selecting Help->About,

Figure 6. The about dialog

will show a dialog with 3 different pages providing you with contact information, the xconvers logo, a short helpfile a copyright notice.

Next Previous Contents