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Not being one to leave well enough alone, I came across two very interesting

files the other day. The first was ANSI13.ZIP. It was a ANSI.SYS replacement

in the form of ANSI.COM, from PC magazine. It replaces the normal ANSI.SYS

usage in CONFIG.SYS and is placed in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Being a TSR type of COM

file, it offers switches to unload, turn on and off and set the buffer size

for keyboard redifinition.....very interesting. The second file is USEANSI.TXT,

an essay on the joys of function key redefinition. After a good explanation

of how to use ANSI, it then offers a debug cookbook to build com files to

turn that useless real estate on your keyboard into something usefull.

Very good. The only thing lacking was an easy way to change the Fkey

definitions with out having to build seperate and numerious com files to

allow for different setups.


          Hmmmm.   How bout a batch file????    OK lets do it!


Eight or ten hours and and 20 or 30 thousand bytes later....we have SUCCESS...

in the form of FKSET.BAT, FKRUN.BAT, FKRESET.BAT and RKEYS. FKSET is the main

batch file that will set function keys one at a time and ALSO builds file

FKSETALL that saves each Fkey definition as it is defined....tricky batch file

stuff....  This means that after you have defined all 40 combinations, if you

can think of 40 of Fkeys, when you reboot or restart, you can run FKRUN and

it will set all of the Fkeys back to the way you had them..... Because file

FKSETALL is a plain ASCII file, you can edit it any way you like, any time,

and not have to bother typing a bunch. Just the way I like it......

NOTE: NOTE: NOTE:

FKRESET.BAT will reset all of the Fkeys back to normal....but...it seems

that this tends to take up about 200+ bytes of the ANSI buffer space.

In testing with ANSI.SYS, when the buffer got full, it was full...REBOOT

TIME. Using ANSI.COM with /B 500, worked well.. this is what I use.

You can also use the ANSI.COM switch /C. It will reset the buffer to what

you started it with and clear out all of the old Fkey stuff. See

ANSI.COMs doc for details. Give the batch files a try..if you like 'um,

use them...if you don't like 'um, change them...if you HATE them...

Oh well, what do you want for free?...just another bit bucket blunder...

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Robert Autry

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