Trial user - help and advice needed

[artig]

During an upgrade from WinXP to Win7 I find that the program editor I've used for many years will not have full Vista/Win7 support for some time. So currently I'm trialling SE. Unfortunately the 15-day trial period is not long enough to learn all the details of Slick-C, to find out whether I can implement some of the functions I've come to rely on with the old editor.

While I appreciate the backup history option when saving files in SE, I would like to implement the method I've been using now for almost 20 years. There's a fixed backup location, where a complete copy of each saved file is stored. The string _YYYYMMDD#HHMMSS (current date and time) is appended to the original file name, retaining the original extension. Each month I zip the previous month's edits together and place them in an archive.

In the file saveload.e there is a user-replaceable hook function save_file that would presumably be modified to include the new functions?

Some other functions I use all the time are center_line, brief_home, and brief_end, but I've worked out how to allocate these to the 'correct' keys. :-)

[Graeme]

During an upgrade from WinXP to Win7 I find that the program editor I've used for many years will not have full Vista/Win7 support for some time. So currently I'm trialling SE. Unfortunately the 15-day trial period is not long enough to learn all the details of Slick-C, to find out whether I can implement some of the functions I've come to rely on with the old editor.

While I appreciate the backup history option when saving files in SE, I would like to implement the method I've been using now for almost 20 years. There's a fixed backup location, where a complete copy of each saved file is stored. The string _YYYYMMDD#HHMMSS (current date and time) is appended to the original file name, retaining the original extension. Each month I zip the previous month's edits together and place them in an archive.

In the file saveload.e there is a user-replaceable hook function save_file that would presumably be modified to include the new functions?

Some other functions I use all the time are center_line, brief_home, and brief_end, but I've worked out how to allocate these to the 'correct' keys. :-)

I'm not exactly sure how I missed this post... (maybe it was the snow storm)
It sounds like it's too late to answer but just in case, yeah, save_file is the function to modify.  You copy it to a file of your own and load it from there.  According to the slick c macro docs, you can call the _time('F') function to get YYYYMMDDhhmmssfff.
If you save a file as often as I do, you're gonna get a ton of files.

I use a modified version of save_file so that a copy of each file I save gets immediately written to our file server, plus I also save a copy of the "backup history" delta backup file  - coz I use them a lot.

Graeme

[artig]

Thank you, Graeme.

Unfortunately it was too late. I found the 15-day trial period was just too short, with little spare time during a conversion from WinXP to Win7. Instead I managed to get the old editor to work satisfactorily in Win7 by fiddling some folder security settings.

I should perhaps save files more often. The total size of about 18 years of editing is close to half a gigabyte in zipped format, which is a reasonable size to store.