DESCRIPTION bs is a simple button shell for X11. It is very useful for repetitive tasks such as edit-compile-run cycles, and also as a general purpose menu. See the man page below for more information. INSTALLATION Download bs from ftp://csg.uwaterloo.ca/pub/lhf/bs.tar.gz. Then just try xmkmf; make. bs needs an ANSI compiler. if xmkmf does not use that, you might have to add CC = gcc or something similar to Imakefile. Or modify and use Makefile.std. AUTHOR Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo (lhf@visgraf.impa.br) Please send me your comments, bug reports, corrections, etc. ---- man page --------------------------------------------------------------- NAME bs - a simple button shell for X11 SYNOPSIS bs [ file ] [ Xt options ] DESCRIPTION bs is a simple button shell for X11. It is useful for repetitive tasks such as edit-compile-run cycles, and also as a general purpose menu. bs builds, displays, and let you interact with a panel com- posed of labels and buttons. Labels contain informative text and buttons are associated with commands that are fed to a shell, in a pipe. bs reads a panel description from the file given in the com- mand line, or from the file .bsrc in the current directory if no file is given. There are 4 kinds of lines in the file describing the panel: lines starting with a TAB; lines with a TAB elsewhere; lines without a TAB; and empty lines. Lines without a TAB represent labels. The text in the line appears verbatim in the panel. Lines with a TAB not on the first column represent buttons. The text before the TAB is the button text. The text after the TAB is a command fed to the shell when the button is pressed. Lines starting with a TAB are fed to the shell as soon as bs begins. They typically contain variable definitions, but they can contain command. Because bs sends data to a shell using a single pipe that remains open throughout the execu- tion, variables definitions remain after this initializa- tion. Panel layout is controled by empty lines. Buttons and labels appear side by side, from left to right. An empty line signals the start of a new row in the panel. So, descriptions of "horizontal" panels have no empty lines, and descriptions of "vertical" panels have an empty line after each element, including the last one. SPACE characters are significant in labels and button labels. They can be used for alignment, provided a non- proportional font is used. bs automatically adds a button labeled "quit" in the end of the panel; it does the obvious thing. EXAMPLE Here is an example suitable for using TeX: F=paper paper edit xterm -geometry 80x57+0+0 -title $F -e vi $F.tex & tex latex $F.tex