[comp.os.os2.misc] Changing title bar in Full Screen OS2

keating@casemo.UUCP (John Keating ) (07/25/90)

	I've been thinking about the feasability of changing the title bar
that appears at the head of each os2 full screen window...  Basically, what I'm
looking for is a program that will change it to a clock (or add one to it...)
	Are there any programs already out there that will do this?

		-John Keating, III
		 keating@rex.cs.tulane.edu

markha@microsoft.UUCP (Mark HAHN) (08/01/90)

keating@rex.cs.tulane.edu (John Keating ) writes:
>	I've been thinking about the feasability of changing the title bar
>that appears at the head of each os2 full screen window...  Basically, what I'm
>looking for is a program that will change it to a clock (or add one to it...)
>	Are there any programs already out there that will do this?

the help bar at the top of cmd windows is activated 
when $i appearing in the $prompt environment variable.
it's printed by cmd.exe whenever the prompt is printed.
the message itself comes from oso001.msg, but the color
seems to be fixed (I didn't check this detail.)
thus, if you have the wherewithal (the mkmsgf tool)
you could change the string, or even edit oso001.msg directly.

alternatively, you could write a little daemon that does nothing
but constantly update a clock display.  it ought to be clever
enough not to update the display when its session is not foreground.
it would also be clever to have just one process do the timekeeping,
so you don't have an avalanche of events when the new minute happend.
I can't think of anything bombproof to handle the case 
when some other process overwrites the clock (like an editor).

regards,
-- 
Mark Hahn         microsoft!markha@uunet.uu.net         uunet!microsoft!markha
YES, Bill Gates IS my personal savior, and I CHANNEL for him in CLEAR WEATHER.

dedalus@athena.mit.edu (Lewis J. Gramer) (08/02/90)

Using the ANSI escape sequences in  your prompt is the (much simpler) accepted
way to add weird stuff to your full-screen session. For instance, there
are escape
sequences for putting the cursor anywhere on the screen, for "pushing"
the current
positiion of the cursor to pop later, for printing the current time,
date, working dir,
changing colors, changing bold/normal/blinking, you name it!

What's more, this technique works just as well in any DOS (after
1.mumble) as in OS/2.

The only drawback to this approach is that your clock on gets updated
each time
you hit enter... If this is liveable, then just check you r DOS or OS/2
tech ref  for the
appropriate escape sequences to do all of this.

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