View GEDCOM application - Categorized in: Feature Suggestions

Brett: Sometimes the simplest things just aren't obvious when you've been programming for awhile. Why I did it that way: frankly I can't remember. But now that you put this in front of my face, yes, this is the way I should do it.

However, Tamura's review has already led me to think I should reinstitute the logfile that was in versions of Behold up to 2 years ago. It integrates the log and the GEDCOM files together in a window which would allow clicking on an error message and taking you right to the line in question. And that will be one of the next things on my list (after the bug fixes) because having the log file will help to diagnose problems better, such as the ones arising in the early beta.

Tamura made a point to me saying I should advertise the great error checking of Behold and have a comprehensive log file. And I think that's right, as Tamura pointed out privately to me that if a program gets interrupted, the integrated error messages now in Behold's Everything Report will not be available.

What I could do instead is on the GEDCOM/Log window, have a "Open in external editor" button, and use the default program that is used for *.txt files as you suggest, but right now I'm not sure that will be required.

It's two years later and just prior to Version 1.0 release, and I was revisiting some of the Behold forum posts. This one caught me. Why wasn't I using the default text viewer?

At the time of Brett's post, Behold always loaded text files using notepad. After his post, I added an ability to specify the text viewer to use. But no, I wasn't using the default viewer.

To my surprise, the default text viewer is not easy to figure out. You can messily search the registry yourself (ugh!!) or else you need an existing file to pass to a special Windows function to get it. My trouble was that I was trying to open .log or .ged files using the default .txt reader. Eventually I figured out the workaround. That is to pass Behold's readme.txt file to the Windows function to get the text reader, and if that doesn't work, then just use notepad.exe.

Good enough and eliminates an unneeded form in Behold that was defining the text reader.

A StackOverflow question I asked that provided various techniques to help find this is at:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2577213/how-can-i-get-the-name-of-the-program-associated-with-a-file-extension-using-del