SlyEdit

SlyEdit is the second full-featured full screen editor for Synchronet, written by nightfox in JavaScript. SlyEdit can run in one of two styles, to mimic the look & feel of IceEdit or DCT Edit, two popular BBS message editors from the 1990s. The style is specified by a command-line argument. SlyEdit also supports customization of options via a configuration file and colors via theme files.

SlyEdit will recognize the user's terminal size and set up the screen accordingly.

Thanks go out to all the sysops and users who have reported bugs, made suggestions, and helped test SlyEdit, including the following people:

• Access Denied of The Pharcyde (pharcyde.org) for testing the newer versions and for his input on various features, including message quoting and cross-posting
• Psi-Jack of Decker's Heaven (bbs.deckersheaven.com) for providing an example of implementing support for PageUp, PageDown, and function keys
• echicken of Electronic Chicken (bbs.electronicchicken.com) for his idea for looking up the original author of a message after a user changes the “To” name when replying to a message
• Nick of Lightning BBS (lightningbbs.dyndns.org) for testing early versions

SlyEdit is normally installed into the Synchronet exec directory. Its configuration files are normally located in the ctrl directory. See slyedit for SCFG installation instructions for SlyEdit.

There is a menu-driven configuration script you can use to configure the options for SlyEdit. To use it, open a command prompt, change to your sbbs/exec directory, and run this command:

jsexec slyedcfg

Alternately, you can specify the .js filename extension if you want to:

jsexec slyedcfg.js

You can also edit the configuration file manually. The configuration file, SlyEdit.cfg (located in the ctrl directory), is a regular text file. It is split up into 3 sections - Behavior, Ice colors, and DCT colors. These sections are designated by [BEHAVIOR], [ICE_COLORS], and [DCT_COLORS], respectively. Each setting has a name=value format. Comments can be added on their own line starting with a ; (semicolon) character. The settings for SlyEdit.cfg are described below:

Behavior settings

Ice color settings

DCT color settings

The color theme configuration files (located in the ctrl directory) are regular text files. Each setting has a name=value format. Comments can be added on their own line starting with a ; (semicolon) character. The color settings use Synchronet's ctrl-a_codes.

The color theme files are plain text files that can be edited with a text editor. For each color setting, you can specify color attribute characters as specified in the Synchronet documentation for ctrl-a_codes. Note that you don't need control (Ctrl-A) characters for the color settings; just the attribute characters (As of SlyEdit 1.81 (2022-11-26)). A couple examples of specifying colors:
High green: gh
Normal cyan: c


The following are the default Ice-style theme files included with SlyEdit:

SlyIceColors_BlueIce.cfg (based on the original IceEdit theme)
SlyIceColors_EmeraldCity.cfg (based on the original IceEdit theme)
SlyIceColors_FieryInferno.cfg (based on the original IceEdit theme)
SlyIceColors_Fire-N-Ice.cfg (based on the original IceEdit theme)
SlyIceColors_GenericBlue.cfg (based on the original IceEdit theme)
SlyIceColors_ShadesOfGrey.cfg (based on the original IceEdit theme)
SlyIceColors_PurpleHaze.cfg (an original SlyEdit theme)

The following are the default DCT-style theme files included with SlyEdit:

SlyDCTColors_Default.cfg (based on the original DCT Edit theme)
SlyDCTColors_Midnight.cfg (based on the original DCT Edit theme)

The color settings are listed below:
Ice-style Color Theme Settings

DCT-style Color Theme Settings

Common colors (appearing in both Ice and DCT color theme files)

These are the key bindings for SlyEdit:

Note: It takes a couple of seconds to recognize the ESC key, so when using the ESC key, there will be a noticeable delay before the action takes place.

The tagline configuration file (by default, SlyEdit_Taglines.txt) can be placed in one of the following directories (searched in this order):
- The mods directory
- The ctrl directory
- The same directory as SlyEdit's .js files

The tagline configuration file is a plain text file containing a list of taglines, one on each line. SlyEdit includes its own tagline file, but you are free to edit it or use another tagline file altogether. It is recommended that taglines are limited to 78 characters in order to fit in the tagline window in SlyEdit. Taglines of any length will be used; however, only the first 78 characters will appear in the tagline selection box in SlyEdit.

User also have the option to use a random tagline. Taglines more than 78 characters in length are thus still useful for that purpose.

SlyEdit also supports the following slash commands, to be used on a blank line by themselves (they are not case-sensitive):

As of version 1.88b (2024-02-11), SlyEdit is able to accept UTF-8 character/text input.

If you use Digital Distortion Message Lister, you must update the message lister to version 1.36 or newer in order for it to work properly with SlyEdit 1.27. The reason is due to information that the message lister provides to SlyEdit. When replying to a message, SlyEdit is able to retrieve author initials when it quotes messages. Normally, SlyEdit gets the information it needs about messages directly from Synchronet, but when using the message lister, that information must be provided by the message lister, as the message lister can't change the information that Synchronet provides. Starting with version 1.36 of Digital Distortion Message Lister, the message lister always writes the message number to its drop file (rather than either the message offset or message number).

Version table:

Since version 1.64, SlyEdit has a spell check feature. Spell check can be started by the user with the Ctrl-R hotkey, or by the Edit > Spell Checker option in the DCT-style ESC menu (only available when in DCT mode). For spell check, SlyEdit will check each word to see if it exists in the configured dictionary/dictionaries, and if not, it will prompt the user for a corrected version of the word. The sysop can configure one or multiple dictionaries in SlyEdit.cfg with the dictionaryFilenames option. Dictionary files need to be in the format dictionary_<languageName>.txt, where <languageName> is the name of the language. Also, ideally, the language names should follow standard language tags, as in “en-us” for English (US), etc. See these web pages for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_localisation http://www.lingoes.net/en/translator/langcode.htm Also, the dictionary filenames will be parsed and the language name will be used in the menu of dictionaries in the user options - The user is able to enable/disable the configured dictionaries for their own use for the spell checker.

For the dictionaryFilenames option in SlyEdit.cfg, you can specify a comma-separated list of dictionary filenames. The dictionary filenames are in the format dictionary_<languageName>.txt, where <language> is the language name. In this list, the filenames can be in that format, or just <languageName>.txt, or just <languageName>. You can leave the setting blank to use all dictionary files that exist on the system. Language names are meant to be in ISO standard language and localization tags - For example, en-US specifies English with spellings for the US. Also, for dictionaries with localized spellings, the filenames can have a “-supplemental” at the end of their name before the extension if they only contain words that are unique to a particular region that don't exist for all regions. Also, dictionary filenames can just contain the language without a localization if they contain words common to all regions. For example:

SlyEdit will search for the dictionary files in the following directories, in this order:

1. sbbs/mods
2. sbbs/ctrl
3. SlyEdit's own directory

Dictionary files must be sorted in order for word matching to work properly (SlyEdit uses a binary search for quick word matching, which requires the words to be sorted).

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