Features and requirements of ViewS [Features] [Requirements] [Planned Features] [Back to Mainpage] [Download ViewS]

List of features:

most important feature ;-) ViewS is freeware; there are no restrictions for free private use; if you want to use it in any commercial way, contact me first

pleasant softscrolling (in normal textmode - no need for graphicsmode - no need for modeswitching)

wrapping of long lines (at user-changeable width)

optional word-wrapping (which doesn't cut words) and formatted wrapping (which keeps indentions)

extremely fast searching for text-patterns (case-sensitive and -tolerant) (didn't found another program matching this speed so far :-)

very fast searching for boolean-expressions (link simple patterns or expressions with boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT and ANDS; use sub-expressions; optionally define a range for each expression (like SameLine,SameChapter and so on); define patterns as case-sensitive/-tolerant or explicitly as whole word)

little memory needs (just needs a bit of the 640K basemem; no extended or expanded memory required) but can read files up to 2 GBytes big

some kind of temporary bookmarks

store/restore last position permanently (one position per file)

any BIOS supported textmode or any textmode with 10 to 61 lines and 80 or 90 columns

print/extract whole text or just selected lines (extracting can append or overwrite existing files; your choice)

read from StdIn (for piping DOS-output from other programs into ViewS)

historylists for input-lines (earlier text-input (e.g. for searching, or filenames for extracting) is memorized and can be re-used later; single history-entries can be removed easily or the whole input-history can be disabled)

txt2exe-utility using a smaller version of ViewS (currently not up to date, and limited to textfiles up to 64KB)

maaaannny user-changeable settings

quite small executable (about 135KB currently)

(The executable (VIEWS.EXE) runs without any additional (supplemental) binaries. When running it may create a data-file (VIEWSAV.DAT) for input-history and stored positions (only if needed) in the same directory like the executable.
If you want to customize ViewS you need VIEWS.CFG and VIEWSCFG.EXE.
The rest of the package contains of documentation- and utility-files which are not requested for running ViewS.)

Requirements:

80286 or better (no need for original Intel CPU's ;-) (yes, 286-compatibility is back...)
DOS v3.3 or higher (absolutely no need for MS-products)

(an emulation may work too

Linux DOSEMU: fullscreen works ; X-window 'DOS in a box' only with ViewS' VGA emulation support enabled ; terminal mode doesn't work

WinNT DOS box: fullscreen works ; windowed DOS box works properly with ViewS' VGA emulation support enabled

)

VGA-compatible graphics card
keyboard (maybe even works without, but then you could miss some features ;-)
mouse (optionally)
about 200KB of free DOS-mem (doesn't use EMS, XMS or DPMI)

Planned features

multi-file search (including background search)
multi-file display (multiple files at command-line and response file @xyz.lst (like Hiew's Ctrl-F9 ...)
regular expression search
some more text-formats (ANSI, some wordprocessor-formats, maybe HTML, ...)
update VTXT2EXE (up to date ViewS-version and convert files bigger than 64KB)

(read todo.txt

for more)

Boolean Expressions

Simply said, boolean expressions allow you to search for e.g. a certain chapter, a certain line, a certain file and so on - it's called a range below.
To make clear what certain range you are searching for, you define some properties that range is required to have.
Such properties are the presence of certain text-parts (e.g. words or phrases - just called patterns).

Boolean-operators (like AND and OR) which link the seperate patterns then just define if all or just one of them needs to be present in that range.

Maybe a little example can help:

Consider you are searching for a certain chapter. This chapter should contain a certain line and the word "Definition". The line we want to be in the chapter then should contain the word "boolean" and the word "expression".

The related boolean expression would be:

(SameChapter (SameLine "boolean" AND "expression") AND "Definition")

These were just some features the boolean search implementation of ViewS provides.
Advanced features include:

use of subexpressions

use of negative subexpressions/patterns

the ANDS-operator (allows you to search for a certain sequence - fixed order)

the local definition of case-tolerance or case-sensitivity

definition of patterns as whole words (whole word "test" woud e.g. not match if just found inside 'greatest')

optional use of short forms and symbols (e.g. + for AND , for OR & for ANDS and so on)

definition of own keywords

Just read chapter .6.9 in the documentation for more information about boolean search in ViewS.

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last update: 98-08-17 This page hosted by Get your own Free Homepage