Saturday, December 28, 2002 - Sat, 28 Dec 2002

Got a little off-track today. It happens from time-to-time. During my work yesterday, I found a bug in my implementation of “overwrite” mode that causes Behold to crash. Overwrite mode is what you normally change to in an editor when you press the Insert key. Then all keys you press will overwrite the character under the cursor rather than insert it. Richview does not directly support overwrite, so I wrote my own (imperfect) implementation of it about a year ago. So when I found this overwrite bug, I ended up spending three hours today working on it, and at the end of that I realized that it wasn’t worth the effort right now. I won’t be using this feature until I add editing into Behold which won’t be until version 2, and by then RichView may have its own version of “overwrite” mode already implemented.

But while thinking about it, Sergey did say just before his latest release of RichView a few days ago that he was going to be polling users on what they would like to see done next in RichView. I’ve privately gone over many of my wants with him, and he’s done quite a few and added others to his ToDo list, but I thought this a good time to go through my RichView binder in detail and see what’s still remaining. Number 1 was correct behavior for the arrow keys and PageUp/PageDown. Hopefully this gets in before my first release of Behold. The other 6 items won’t be needed until Version 2, and they are: Overwrite mode, picture positioning, speedup of formatting, hidden text, small caps and a splitter. I posted a nice message relating this to the RichView newsgroup.