Icons Menu

The Icons menu allows you to work with the icons on the screen. An icon must be selected before the menu options illustrated in Figure 4-3 become available.

Figure 4-3.

Icons Menu

Open

Opening an icon makes a program or window available.

When you open a disk or drawer icon, a window displays the icons contained on that disk or in that drawer. When an individual project or tool is opened, the corresponding program starts.

Open an icon by selecting it an choosing Open.

Mouse Shortcut: Point to the icon and double-click the selection button.

Copy

Copy allows you to duplicate disks, drawers, programs, or files within a window. To copy material to another window, use the drag-copy method described in Chapter 3. Drag-copying is the easiest method of copying a disk on a two-floppy-system.

Use Copy for making backup copies of your disks.

To copy a drawer, project, or icon:

1. Select the icon.
2. Choose Copy from the Icons menu.

Copying disks on single-floppy disk drive systems entails a process known as swapping. Source and destination disks are swapped in the single drive as the system first reads information from the source disk and the writes it to the destination disk. The destination disk must be write-enabled, but need not be formatted since Copy formats the disk as it writes to it. Be sure to copy to disks of the same density as the original disks.

To copy a disk on a single-floppy disk drive system:

1. Insert the source disk into the Amiga's internal disk drive.
2. Select the source disk's icon.
3. Choose Copy from the Icons menu. Insert the Workbench disk, if necessary.
4. If the disk copy requires at least five swaps, a requester tells you how many swaps are needed. Closing any unnecessary windows or stopping any unwanted programs helps reduce the number of swaps.
5. Select the Continue gadget in the swap requester. During the disk copy, the icon for the disk being copied is unavailable and is labeled "BUSY".
6. Insert the source disk into the drive when prompted and select Continue. A horizontal bar gauge shows the percentage of the disk copy completed.
7. Insert the destination disk into the drive when prompted and select Continue to copy the information read in from the source disk. Swap the disks as often as requested. When the copy is finished, a Disk Copy Finished message appears.
8. Remove the destination disk from the drive and label it. The destination disk's icon is labeled with a copy_of_prefix (for example, copy_of_DataDisk).

Rename

Rename changes the name of an icon. It is used to remove the copy_of_prefix from something you copied, as well as for changing the names of drawers, disks, and files.

To rename an icon:

1. Select the icon.
2. Choose Rename from the Icons menu. A requester containing a text gadget displays the current name of the icon.
3. Delete the old name using Backspace or right Amiga+X and enter the new name. Do not use spaces before or after the new name. Because embedded spaces are not visible, they can cause confusion if you have to type in the icon name again.
4. Press Return. The new name appears under the icon.

Information

Information displays status information about the selected icon's file. Certain data can also be modified in the Information window. Figure 4-4 illustrates the Information window.

Figure 4-4.

Icon Information Window

Although the contents of the window varies with the icon, the following information is always displayed:

title bar	The window title bar indicates the path to the icon.
name	The icon name and its type in parentheses (Volume, Drawer, Tool, Project, or Trashcan).
image	A picture of the icon.
size	The number of blocks and bytes that the disk, project, or tool fills.
stack	The amount of memory reserved as temporary storage for a specific tool.
last changed date	The date on which the icon was created or the last time it was changed (its timestamp).

For a disk icon, the window also shows whether a disk is write-enabled (Read/Write) or write-protected (Read Only).

For a drawer, trashcan, project, or tool, the following attributes can be set or cleared by clicking on the attribute's check box.

Script	If set, the file is a script (a text file of AmigaDOS commands) and can be run without using the EXECUTE command.
Archived	This attribute is set by backup programs to indicate that a file or directory has been archived (backed up). It is cleared whenever the file is saved.
Readable	If set, information in the file can be read. If this attribute is clear, a tool will not run and a project cannot be loaded by its Default Tool.
Writable	If set, information can be written into the file. Unless Writable is set, you cannot make changes to the file.
Executable	If set, the file is a tool that can be run from Workbench or the Shell. If this attribute is clear, the tool cannot be run from the Shell.
Deletable	If set, the drawer, project, or tool can be erased from the disk. If clear, the object is protected from deletion.

If the icon represents a project, there is a Default Tool gadget. This specifies the path to the tool that created the project. When the project icon is opened, the default toll is also opened to work on the project.

If there is a Comments box, you can add a note of up to 79 characters by selecting the text gadget next to Comments, entering the text, and pressing Return.

The Tool Types box specifies different startup options for some programs or files. Icon Tool Types are described in Chapter 3.

To save any changes made to the Information window, select the Save gadget in the lower left corner.