Chapter 3 -
Terminal Management
You won't feel comfortable with a client unless you know how to edit the command line, move through the command history and look back at what has already scrolled through the terminal. This chapter and the next one will try to explain, among other things, how these tasks are performed.
As you might already know, Genius is an MDI application, which means that it can handle more than one open document at a time, say, more than one terminal. Each terminal can have an own connection, so with one instance of Genius, you can log in to several remote servers as well as local servers.
Aligning Terminal Windows
Genius always launches with one terminal open and maximized. That way you can immediately connect without worrying about terminal windows. However, as soon as you intend to conncect to several servers, you should learn how to handle different terminal windows within one instance of Genius.
If you want to try some things out, open Genius and hit Ctrl-N twice. The window will flicker a bit, but nothing really seems to change. But in fact, Genius has created two more terminals and both maximized them as well, finally showing the terminal that has been created last. Now you're ready to arrange those three windows.
In the beginning, The Genius window might look like this (please note that in the example below, I loaded a log file into each terminal and entered Expert mode to free up space. This is my normal mode of operation, because I know Genius quite well and don't need the visual user interface.
Now, hit F5. This will normalize all terminal windows and align them in columns. You won't normally do this unless you have a wide screen and are only working with two terminals. Otherwise, the page width per terminal will be much too low. The end result might look like this:
Now hit F6. This will align all terminals in rows, which is very useful if you have several terminals and need to free space to the left or right of the client, in order to work with other applications while keeping an eye on the terminals. The example below isn't very good, as the Genius window is much too wide now. You'd resize it, of course, so it'd be higher than wide.
Now hit F7. This will align all terminals in a matrix with the number of columns and rows most suitable for the given number of terminals. If some space is left uncovered, you still can grab the lower border of the rightmost terminal and drag it down to cover it up. This mode is useful for three terminal windows and more.
If you hit F8, you're back to the original situation, with all terminal windows maximized.
Switching Terminal Windows
By pressing Ctrl+TAB, you can cylce through all terminal windos, no matter if maximized or arranged in a certain fashion. Edit focus is always on the active terminal, so you can key in a command, send it, switch to the next terminal and type a command there, then switch on. If there are only two terminals, Ctrl+TAB will simply toggle between them.
The Toolbar
The toolbar contains buttons for some popular Genius actions, but not for all of them, of course. The best thing about the toolbar is that it has nice colors, and that you can turn it off with Ctrl+B. Of course you can turn it on again with the same shortcut.
Each button has a tooltip. This is considered good style in today's applications, so it is a must. I hate applications that have toolbars without tooltips. Here's a tooltip example:
Tooltips are shown whenever you move the mouse onto a button and keep it still for a couple of seconds. Once a tooltip is shown, you can glide the mouse past all buttons you'd like to see help on.
Some explanations for each button:
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The Connect button This button will bring up the Account form, and if there is a selected terminal window without an active connection, you will be allowed to connect this terminal to the selected server. F2 is a shortcut for this button. |
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The Disconnect button This button will disconnect the currently selected terminal. If no terminal is selected or if it doesn't have an active connection, this button will be disabled and look exactly like shown here. Ctrl+D is a shortcut for this button |
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The Add New Terminal button This will simply create a new terminal. You can create as many terminals as you like. The shortcut Ctrl+N is a much more convenient way to create new terminals. |
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The Options button This button will bring up the Option form and display the option set of the currently selected terminal, if possible. F3 is a shortcut for this button |
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The Open Log File button This button will show a file dialog where you can select a log file for reviewing. Because Genius saves ANSI codes in log files, it isn't a bad idea to open them again in Genius for reading. Please note that the log file will be displayed according to the option set selected for the terminal, so if there are no ANSI colors, hit F3 and make sure the right option set is assigned to the terminal. Ctrl+L is a shortcut for this button |
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The Save Terminal Buffer button Unlike some other clients, you needn't decide to log a session in advance. Because Genius remembers the entire session, you can just connect, do your things, and if you find out that you'd like to have a log of your session after all, just click this button and save the entire buffer to disk. Ctrl-S is a shortcut for this button |
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The Set Logfile button If you are not sure if your system will survive the entire session, set a log file right at the beginning of the session by clicking on this button. This will make sure that every line of the session is written to disk as soon as it has been received, so if your system crashes, you still have the log. Ctrl+Shift+L is a shortcut for this button. |
The Popup Menu
The popup menu, although not required to operate Genius, is quite useful if you're not exactly a Genius literate but still dared to enter Expert Mode. It provides access to all Genius functions, and each menu item shows the associated shortcut. That way you'll be able to learn the shortcuts, and one day you will just forget about the popup menu.
Here are some explanations for each menu entry.
The Edit item groups all functions that are related to editing. As you can see, Genius doesn't only know copy and paste, but two additional functions. The problem with most traditional clients is that they just can't copy and paste text blocks that span multiple lines. If you have prepared a set of commands in a text file and try to paste them into the command line of a client, it'll only send the first line in most cases.
Genius is different.
f you Paste (Ctrl-V), Genius will, by default, read the text from the clipboard and send line by line directly to the server. The command line and history will remain unaffected by this procedure.
If you select text in Genius and copy it, Genius will store the selected passage in the clipboard, unmodified, with all line breaks.
Now for the alternative modes. If you Paste Line (Shift+Ctrl+V), Genius will read all lines contained in the clipboard and remove the line breaks, trimming and joining lines to form one single paragraph. Then, this single line of text will be inserted into the command line at the current cursor position. This is often required when building on a MUD, and you certainly will love this feature once you have tried it out.
If you Copy Line (Shift+Ctrl+C), all text selected in the terminal will be copied into the clipboard, also stripped from line breaks, trimmed and joined. This effectively allows you to say the entire scrollback buffer with one single command.
Select All (Ctrl+A) simply selects the entire scrollback buffer. If this is too much for your taste, you may also select a passage with the mouse.
Need information from a tell that happened half an hour ago? No time to re-read the entire scroll-back buffer? No problem as long as you remember a relevant keyword. Just hit Ctrl+F, enter the word and let Genius search for you.
In case there are several matches, you can jump to the next one with Find Next, or simply by pressing F3.
The Terminal item groups all functions related to terminals. The alignment functions already described above are present as well as the option to create a new terminal, plus a new thing we didn't see so far. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace will clear the entire terminal, so you can start with a clean sheet of paper.
The Logging item contains the same functions as provided by the Log buttons on the toolbar.
The Extras item contains mixed vegetables like functions to toggle toolbar and expert mode, and the telnet section. The telnet console (Ctrl+T) is a floating window that can be used to manually set off telnet commands, and to display a log of the telnet negotiation process. The Negotiate function (Ctrl+N) initiates telnet negotiation, and you can use it to manually initiate telnet if the telnet negotiation is disabled in the option set.
The three telnet commands AYT, IP and AO can be called with the specified shortcuts whenever you need them. The individual commands are explain in Chapter 5.
