Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!oliveb!apple!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!kit
From: kit@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Chris D. Peterson)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: capturing user input to an Athena text widget
Message-ID: <8904271534.AA02563@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 27 Apr 89 15:34:50 GMT
References: <2453@lll-lcc.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36


> I find the documentation for Athena text widgets rather obscure...

The programmers have been writing the docs again :-)

> scrollOnOverflow|scrollVertical|wordBreak|editable (<- I'm not sure if
> it does any good to put 'editable' here since I'm in textAppend
> mode??).  

It does nothing at all in this case, except possiblly give you a warning message.

> 1.  Am I correct to use textAppend and asciiDiskWidgetClass?

Seems fine to me.

> 2.  How do I capture the user's input to a variable?

If you are using an asciii disk widget you can read the file.
Yea, that is kind of gross.  The other thing you can do is use a
disk widget for the output and a string widget for the input.  Then if
you pass a properly allocated string and lenght of this string (XtNstring
and XtNlength) the text widget will use it in place and you can
just look at the string.

> 3.  If using asciiDiskWidgetClass is correct, what would be the best
>     way of clearing the file every once in awhile, since this program
>     may be running for days at a time?  Should I just close it and
>    then reopen it?


To be safe you should destroy the disk source, remove the file, and
then create a new disk source with a new file.


                                                Chris D. Peterson
                                                MIT X Consortium