KeyRead.EXE

KeyRead.EXE is Copyright (C) 1990 by Gene Fowler and is not public domain
software, involving Borland's copyrights as well as my own. You may use Key-
Read.EXE without paying a licensing fee, and you pass it along to others if
you do not sell it or charge a fee beyond reasonable costs for getting it del-
ivered and that you include this file with the .EXE file. If you make a $15
donation to the "workbench" fund, I'll send you the improved version when
there is one.

There is no warranty, real or imaginable, of any kind on this software. I
don't see any conceivable harm, electronic, physical or moral, that can follow
from running the program or using its data, but if you're inventive enough to
do harm with it, you'll have to sue yourself.

KeyRead is a programmer's quick reference for keys. Sorry, it's not yet a TSR
which is no big deal if you're working in DesqView or Windows but might be in
you are working at the dos prompt. But presumably, you'll work in an IDE or a
programmer's editor and can shell out to use KeyRead and possibly even save
the DOS screen for later.

It'll just keep scrolling entry lines until you enter 'q' and stop it. The
last image stays on screen, with the second line from the top of the screen,
where no entries lie, cleared and your dos prompt placed there. If you then
return to Borland's IDEs or my A_Edit, you can look at that last image with
Alt-F5. Other IDEs and editors may have an equivalent reference screen. You
can, of course, do PrtScr at any time for a hardcopy of a block of entries.

During each ReadKey session if you used the /s or /S switch (for save), a
KeyRead.LOG is created or written over and all the lines of the session are
written into this textfile. It's available like any other text file.

I install (and later remove) an ISR9. It's very benign, but it is in there
and you should know about it. It's from another experiment. I liven up some
of the int 16h dead keys. In KeyRead, you can hit ^Top# and get the ^8 or ^0
or ^1 usually denied you. I use FFh as a second ASCII-null for special keys
with the isr9 and my int 16h reader. So far only for the ^Top# keys. Another
delight for the exploratory type: hold down the Alt key and type in an ascii
and release the Alt key. KeyRead will describe your action. Two ^Top# are
available through the BIOS. You'll want the codes: ^2 is 0300; ^6 is 071Eh.

I've worked in identification of some of the shift-key combos that Readers I
have seen do not trap (I.e., Programmer's Productivity Pack, a shareware pack
widely distributed a couple years ago) and which do not receive "values" from
int 16h. I.e., Shift-Enter gets the same ax as Enter. Propak doesn't indicate
it. But everybody uses Shift-Enter for a special new-line or an indent to
prior line beginning or other such. And, now, in TP, using Turbo Vision, which
emulates Windows and OWL in some ways, shift and "auxiliary" pad keys are used
for selecting text and clipboard handling. So I've worked in those Shift-Key
combos. Other delights will turn up. And there's likely things I've missed. If
you get a rude "_________" that's just my old (but unremoved) last trap for
anything that got through all the intended traps. You can do a PrtSc and write
in what you pressed to get the numbers on the left.

No electronic addresses. Correspondence has to be by way of renting pack room
on the U.S. Mule...

Gene Fowler
The Re-Geniusing Project
1432 Spruce Street
Berkeley, CA 94709