ME2006 Tools/Customize (loses focus - locks up)

[Hawk521]

My week old install of ME2006 was working fine last Friday. Today I fired it up for the first time this week and I can no longer access the Tools/Customize feature. When I click on Customize, the entire ME window loses focus and no mouse clickable buttons or toolbar items can be accessed. It never displays the Customize subwindow. The F1 key does summon the HELP screen, but any other keys are ignored until I hit the ESC key.

Pressing the ESC key immediately returns focus to this ME2006 window, but still does not provide access to the Customize subwindow. This may be something simple - but I've yet to figure it out.

I reinstalled ME2006 10.00.01 and this problem persists.

Suggestions would be welcome.

[deleyd]

When you reinstalled did you ask it to copy over your previous settings? Could be something corrupted in the MeConfig.db or Wcmdmap.db file (if you're using the default command map set). Perhaps you could post here as an attachment your MeConfig.db file and your Wcmdmap.db file (if you're using the default command map set). These files are in e.g. C:\Program Files\Multi-Edit 2006\Config\

[Hawk521]

Thanks for the input. It prodded me to look for the Status.mew file that was the problem.

After poking around a bit, I found and deleted the "Status.mew" file in a folder off the root I had named C:\Sessions. Deleting that file fixed my problem. Apparently there was something corrupt in that file that was restoring the problem every time I launched ME2006.

I'm going to learn to live with ME for Windows yet. But I'll always miss the simple old DOS days...

[shanevincent]

It seems that there are problems with the sessions in MEW2006.

I cannot seem to save and recover sessions anymore (at least not with any consistent hope of recovering the session).

I do hope that this issue is resolved sometime soon, as it's hard for me to claim that MEW is more productive than similar products when such a core feature (at least to me) doesn't function in a useful manner.

[deleyd]

I'm not having any problems with the Session Manager. You could check and/or delete your session files under Program Files\Multi-Edit 2006\Config\Sessions\. Check that you have "Encoded Status files for each dir" option and your Status File Path is good under TOOLS -> CUSTOMIZE -> Sessions.

[shanevincent]

Maybe there's a problem with ME understanding <User_Path>Sessions, because I had all of those options enabled already.

[deleyd]

I just now noticed a quirk with the Session Manager. I'm not quite sure what it is but something isn't quite right about it. I'll look into it in a day or two.

[John Martzouco]

uh oh!... this is one of those features that I can't live without!

I'm watching this thread very carefully,
John

[deleyd]

I've compared the code in the latest SessMgr.s (Me2006 10.02, due to be released today, or very soon), with that of 9.10.04, and there appear to be no functional changes in the code, other than the Session Manager dialog box is now resizeable which is quite nice (new in 10.02), and a few small code optimizations, which I easily verified are correct. So I'm guessing any problem Session Manager has it had back in 9.10.04 too.

I'll look into it maybe this weekend.

[deleyd]

I see there may be a problem if the length of your session name + the length of your directory path for that session exceeds 243 characters. So I advise to name your sessions rather than accept the default of having your session name set to the directory path before you exit Session Manager.

(Tech note: SessMgr.s macro Sm_Dialog returns string "\x7F" + "DIR=" + S_Dir + "\x7F" + "NAME=" + S_Name, and this string gets truncated to 254 because the receiving string is declared without a specified size, so it defaults to a size of 254.

[deleyd]

There's another problem with Session Manager where in several places it declares a string to hold the session directory path to be 128 characters instead of 259. Attached is my fixed version of SessMgr.s . The four changes I made are marked with //DWD

Just load the file into Multi-Edit 2006 10.02 and compile. (See Introduction to CMAC. 1: Hello World for help on compiling CMAC code.)

A minor remaining problem I decided not to fix is in numerous places a directory path is held in a string with default length of 254, when a directory path can be up to 259. However a directory path of 254 would limit your filenames in that directory to 5 characters in length, so hopefully no one wants to live on the edge that close. (Maximum filename path/name length total is 259.)


And there's still the problem of setting a session name to be the directory path, which can be way long, which causes problems with the display, among other things. The Session Manager dialog sets the session name field length to 30, so you can enter a session name up to 30 characters long.

[Bret Sutton]

I like to sort my sessions by date, since I'm usually interested in the most recently used sessions (and I tend to let them collect). So I added a sort-by-date to the Session Manager.

This version of SessMgr.s includes David's string-length changes.

http://www.multiedit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=5759#5759

[deleyd]

Thank you Brett. I installed your new session manager. It's nice.

[deleyd]

I found another place where session directory name is getting truncated. File SessMgr.s[/b] macro Sm_Make_List around line 640 has

Code: Select all

if ( !S_Read_Bytes( Buf, Hn, 250 )) {

So we're reading in the first 250 characters of the session data file. However the first line contains:

Code: Select all

Put_Line( ME_VERSION_TEXT +                       // 32
    Remove_Space( Copy( Version, 1, 4 ) ) +       // +4
    "    \x7F" + "SESS_BY_NAME=" + Session_Name + //+5+13+30
    "\x7F" + "SESS_HOME_DIR=" + CurrentDir );     //+1+13+259


so we actually need to read the first 357 bytes (assuming we restrict a session name to 30 characters). I tried changing this from 250 to 357 but it just immeidately bombed. So session directories longer than around 170 get truncated which results in an error message that the directory doesn't exist. Fortunately if you select that session it reads the whole file and gets the directory correct.

EDIT: Duh, I forgot to increase the size of Buf, so of course it bombed. Increase the size of Buf to 358 (in case there is a trailing NULL byte issue) and change that S_Read_Bytes to 357, that should work.