Mercator 1.0 pre-alpha
You have been warned....
N.B. The Command control key is Alt on Unix, Control on Windows and
Command on the Mac.
Installation
1) Make sure you have tcl/tk installed. Preferably the latest version
which is 8.2.1 on the Mac and 8.2.2 everywhere else. You can
get tcl/tk from ftp.scriptics.com and I keep copies of the latest
versions on the catless ftp site as well.
2) On Windows, double click on the winstall.tcl icon, goto 3
On Unix run installMercator, goto 3
On the Mac, unpack the mercator.sea.hqx file and run the extractor
if it hasn't automatically, goto 5
3) Fill in the field in the installer window
4) Hit install
5) Then you can run mercator
On Windows by double clicking on mercator.tcl
On Unix by running mercator
On Mac by double clicking the Mercator icon
The System:
The "Command" key varies. On Unix it is Alt, on Windows it is Control and
on the Mac it is Command.
There are three parts to the window :
The tracker which simply is a list of all the nodes that you have
selected and brought to the middle. Command-l hides this. Double
clicking on one of the items makes that one the centre (even if its
text name has changed) You can use button-2 to pull the contents around
to view them. I would like to know if anyone finds this feature useful,
and if so how can I improve it?
The main display window which can be seen either as a tree structure
with parents at the top, kids at the bottom and friends at left and
right, or as a centred diagram. You can change the view using the View
menu. You can turn on and off showing off parents, kids and/or friends.
Command-c goes to centred, Command-t goes to tree. Command-r redraws the
window in the current view which will attempt to lay things out so that
they dont overlap. (ha ha ha ha) (There are no scrollbars - maybe there
should be or maybe some other display management policy - tell me what
you want). Resizing the window maintains the existing layout, but if you
then redraw the layout will shift to use the different space that is available.
Outline mode shows the map as a text outline, but at the moment you cannot
do anything with it.
At the bottom of this window is a set of inkpots that allow you to colour
the links between the nodes. There are also some lines that let you pick the
thickness of the links that are created. I might add some notion of direction
as well. In the centered view parent, friend and child links are supposed
to display using different dot patterns, but it doesn't show up very well.
The rightmost part is the node information window which shows data
connected with the current selected node. You can toggle this by hitting
Command-i. Currently you cannot have several nodes open at once.
When a node is highlighted in blue, keystrokes are entered in its name
field. The name displayed is truncated if necessary on the display but
not in storage.
When a new node is added it becomes the selected node.
Fast Add mode is supposed to let you type a sequence of node names terminated
by a return and have them all created. it is not quite correct yet though.
To make a new node mouse down on one of the coloured blobs and pull and
release. The top blob gives new parents, the sides friends and the
bottom children. These distinctions may have no value or may even be
useful!
Control clicking on a node brings it to the centre. Mouse button 2 (or 3
if you have one) down brings up a menu which lets you do various things.
In particular it lets you unlink/relink a node which causes it to grey out
and will only display if you have the show deleted item checked on the View
menu. If You "unlink all" then the node and all its children will be unlinked.
Relink reverses this process. Destroy really does delete the node.
The Stash item remembers the node and you can then create a link to it
from any other node in the diagram using the Link item - you can chose the
kind of link that is made of course. Currently these "extra" links will not
always display - I am working on this one. (Selecting "Show All Links"
ought to toggle the display but the code is not working and is disabled)
Nodes that have no parents are listed on the Roots menu. This lets you have
several distinct trees in a chart (though of course they can be linked by
friends links). Again, the interface to this could probably be cleaner
and easier to use.
Right-mousing on a Link brings up an equivalent menu for Links. Internally
there are many other things that you can do with links, but at the moment
the interface is not done.
I tried to support right-mousing on the background so that you could a general
menu, but doing this broke the link popup menus so I have removed the feature
for the moment - I will try and find out the cause of the problem and fix it
of course.
Other Bindings
Home takes you to the start node of the chart.
Shortcut keys are shown next to the commands on the menus.
