Release 2.0 of xp

xp started as a filter to simply display stdin in an Athena text
widget.  It grew to be a more general file displayer with an emphasis
on ease of browsing and searching, but I've tried to keep its interface
(and implementation) simple and make it useful in shell scripts.

xp tries to be reasonably efficient in use of memory when displaying
large files, given that the text widgets requires the whole file to be
in memory, by using a read-only text widget and freeing memory when a
file is no longer displayed (so if you go back to a previously
displayed file it gets re-opened).

xp incorporates Henry Spencer's implementation of egrep style regular
expression matching. The xp distribution includes that part of the
regexp distribution which it requires.


to build xp say:

xmkmf
make depend
make

then say

XFILESEARCHPATH=Xp.ad xp *.c&

or

(setenv XFILESEARCHPATH Xzap.ad; xp *.c)&

depending on your shell, to  try it out.



then if you're happy with it:

make install

and

make install.man

for the manual pages.

You must install the correct application defaults file, xp now checks
that is has found the current version and complains otherwise.


xp was developed   on  a Sun-4, SunOS 4.1.1  X11R5
and has successfully  been built & run on 

  Sun-4, SunOS 4.1.1  X11R6
  Sun-4, SunOS 5.3   X11R6
  Linux 1.2.12	X11R6
  HP-UX 8.0 X11R5
  Encore Multimax Umax 4.3  X11R5
  Acorn R260 RiSCIX 1.21 X11R4

Note on pre X11R5 systems the size of the text widget displaying a file
is made is slightly larger than is strictly necessary to avoid a bug in
scrolling the text widget when the caret is on the last displayed line.

TODO

Could go on forever (though xp's philosophy is not to provide features
that can be done in other ways eg by re-invoking xp) but possibilities
are:

  make commands more sam-like,
  change list of files to be displayed from within xp,
  ability to change font from within xp,
  add option to display stdin immediately rather than when EOF reached,
 

gerry.tomlinson@ncl.ac.uk	November 1995
