When ATE is properly configured and operating, it is mostly invisible. It is, in other words, displaying information received and controlled by the host computer, and is behaving as a dumb terminal—exactly as it should.
Since it is a smart terminal, however, there are various functions that it offers in addition to those found on a dumb terminal. Following is a brief summary of those smart terminal funtions
Menus
Across the top of the ATE display is a menu bar showing File...Edit...Settings...Help. The menu bar provides access to those various functions approximately like any Windows program. If you have questions about how any of the offerings work, see Operations...Menus in the A-Shell Reference.
u Scrollback
A-Shell includes a handy and useful feature called scrollback which enables the viewing of lines that have scrolled off the top of the screen. If you perform a DIR command, for example, and A-Shell outputs 50 or 100 lines, only the last 24 lines are visible; the others have scrolled off the top of the display. In the absence of scrollback, those lines are lost to you. With scrollback, however, you simply move the screen "backwards" or "up" to reveal the missing lines.
Rather than being a fixed, 24-line display, in other words, your screen can be a "scrolling window" on everything that has recently been written to it.
To turn scrolling on/off:
| • | Go to Settings on the menu bar and click on Scrollback. |
Once it it turned on, you can scroll up and down by:
| • | holding down the Ctrl key while using the UpArrow and DownArrow keys |
| • | holding down the Ctrl key while rolling up/down with the mouse wheel |
| • | using the vertical scroll bar on the right edge of the window |
Also note the following:
| • | The scrollback buffer holds approximately eight screens (200 lines) of text. |
| • | The scrollback buffer is always on. The actual scrollback of the buffer may be turned off and on, but the buffer itself is always active. This means that when you first turn it on, the existing scrollback buffer text (i.e., the last 200 lines of screen output) can immediately be displayed. |
| • | There is no disadvantage to leaving scrollback on. So it makes sense to turn it on the first time you need it, and then just leave it on for the rest of your session. |
History
2017 July, A-Shell 6.5.1610: Add Scrollback to Settings menu to toggle visibility of the vertical scroll bar.
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u Copy and Paste
Copy and paste operations in ATE work more or less as one would expect, with one important difference from normal Windows conventions.
Ctrl+C is a special keystroke in A-Shell, used to interrupt most programs most of the time. Ctrl+C also means "copy" under Windows.
So when a user hits Ctrl+C in ATE, what does she mean?
Here's how ATE deals with this issue:
| • | If the user has selected some text on the screen and then hits Ctrl+C, ATE interprets the user's intent as "copy," and therefore copies the selected text to the Windows clipboard. In other words, Ctrl+C behaves in normal Windows fashion. After the copy-to-clipboard process is finished, ATE clears the selection. |
| • | If the user hits Ctrl+C when no text is selected, then ATE understands the user's intent to be an A-Shell-style Ctrl+C—i.e., program interrupt. So ATE transmits the Ctrl+C to the host computer. |
To select text, use the normal Windows function of mouse click-hold-drag.
Once the selected text has been copied to the Windows clipboard, it of course behaves like all clipboard content--meaning that you can paste it in to other programs with the normal Windows keystroke of Ctrl+V. The right mouse button will normally offer a paste function as well.
To paste into ATE, put the cursor at the beginning of the field in question and then use the mouse or keystrokes to execute the Edit > Paste function. Although the paste operation is normally used only for one line of characters, it does support the pasting of multiple lines when you have a context (such as VUE) into which it is possible to paste data with linefeeds. Ctrl+V also normally works to paste text from Windows applications into ATE.
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u APEX
A-Shell Preview and EXtensions ("APEX") is a built-in component of A-Shell for Windows and ATE. At the user’s option or under program control, APEX receives a print file and re-directs it into a preview window. That window displays an image of the report and provides the user with various viewing options (zoom, multiple pages, single page, etc.). After previewing the report, the user may then print the report as it was originally intended to be printed (i.e., to the originally-specified printer), print it under user control (different printer, say, or landscape instead of portrait), or discard it. The purpose of the viewer, as with all such print preview functions, is to make sure that you are printing what you think you are printing—and to save time, energy, money and paper in the process. In some cases, viewing the report may eliminate the need for printing entirely.
APEX is documented in the Operations...APEX section of the A-Shell Reference, which see for more information.
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