Shrink
by Nathan Micholey and Alan Bonsor


Although the Pinboard is a useful program to help tidy up your desktop, it does have its drawbacks. When a window is iconised, it can often leave its icon behind a huge stack of other windows which then have to be moved to get at the icon. Shrink offers a helpful alternative, which complements Pinboard, but offers extra facilities to help tidy up your windows.

Using Shrink
When you double-click on Shrink, it will place its icon on the icon bar as normal. The icon has the normal Info and Quit entries, as well as a Lose icon entry. Clicking on that will remove the icon from the icon bar; the application will still be running though. There are two key presses that can be used with Shrink:
Ctrl-Tab will shrink the window whose title bar the pointer is over.
Ctrl-Shift-Tab will shrink all the windows on the desktop.
When a window is shrunk, it will lose its close icon, scroll bars, and work area, leaving just a title bar with a back icon. The title bar will still have the window title in it, and it will still be possible to move the title bar around with the mouse. When all the windows are shrunk, they will appear neatly stacked from the top left of the screen. A shrunken window can be returned to its former size by pressing Ctrl-Tab over its title bar. Its position on screen will have changed if its shrunken title bar has been moved around the screen. When the program is quit, all shrunken windows will return to their former size.

Customising Shrink
If you re-save the desktop !Boot file after loading Shrink, it will add information that will cause it to be reloaded when the machine is next booted. It includes two lines of the form:
	Set Shrink$Options NoIcon
HotKey1=&1AA HotKey2=&1BA
	Filer_Run ADFS::Shrink.$.!Shrink
The first of these lines can then be changed to suit the user. If it contains the word NoIcon, Shrink will load without placing its icon on the icon bar, equivalent to saving the desktop boot file after using the Lose icon menu option. If you want to be able to see the icon again, load the boot file in to Edit, and remove the word NoIcon. The HotKey1 setting can be changed to give the number of a key which should replace Ctrl-Tab. Similarly, the HotKey2 setting can be changed to replace the Ctrl-Shift-Tab key. For example:

Set Shrink$Options HotKey1=27 HotKey2=&1B0

would set the keys to Escape and Ctrl-Shift-Print. To change the hot-keys used, you will need a set of Programmers Reference Manuals to change these settings to one of the settings listed in the documentation for the SWI Wimp_Poll. It is important that keys are chosen which do not conflict with other programs, as they may prevent Shrink from hearing about the key presses that it is supposed to respond to if they have the input focus. The settings in the desktop boot file will only take effect once the program has been run again. It will then save these settings when if the boot file is re-saved.


 Copyright RISC User 1994