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Customizing Your Mosaic Environment

Cathy Curry

If you type Mosaic at your window prompt, you will view the default Mosaic environment as supported by the ECN. You can customize your Mosaic environment to reflect your own choices, such as adjusting your Mosaic Document View window to a specific height and width, changing the default font, adding a Documents menu or setting your home page to a specific URL.

There is a long list of resources you can set to customize your Mosaic environment and a few of these are listed in this article. These modifications are accomplished by setting "X resources" which are usually stored in a personal .Xdefaults file in your HOME directory.

UNIX will read your .Xdefaults file for instructions on how to set various parameters upon Mosaic startup. A line of code in your .Xdefaults file is made up of these units:

class name

is usually the name of a program (Mosaic, Xterm, Xbiff) and is used to identify the program the resource is modifying.

resource

is a name of a variable set to the value that follows it.

value

can be set to three types:

• integer a whole number
• Boolean true or false
• string sequence of characters, i.e., a pathname or window title. Note: if the string contains spaces, it MUST be enclosed in double quotes (").

Sample section from an .Xdefaults file:

Class name resource Value Mosaic personalTypeMap: .mosaic/mailcap Mosaic confirmExit: false Mosaic defaultWidth: 900 Mosaic homeDocument: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/ecn

After you edit and save your .Xdefaults file, you need to run the command xrdb .Xdefaults to cause the resource file to take effect. Restart Mosaic.

Boolean

Whether NCSA Mosaic will pop up a dialog box to confirm exiting the program when the `Exit Program' menu option is chosen. Default is true.

defaultAuthorName:string

String to use as your fullname (e.g., John Q. Public). Your fullname is normally stored in the system password file, and Mosaic will extract it from that if this resource is NULL; else the value of this resource will be used. Default is NULL.

defaultHotlistFile: string

Name of file to store the default hotlist (or list of bookmarks). Default is .mosaic-hotlist-default; the value of the environment variable $HOME will be prepended to this string.

defaultWidth: intege

Default width in pixels for a Document View window. Default is 620.

documentMenuSpecfile: string

Name of file which holds an optional "Documents Menu Specfile," to allow sites to add their own Documents menu to Mosaic's menu bar.

globalExtensionMap: string

Can be set to the location of the system-wide extension map config file of your choice. Default is /usr/local/lib/mosaic/mime.types.

globalHistoryFile: string

Name of file to store the global history of all documents visited from session to session. Default is .mosaic-global-history; the value of the environment variable $HOME will be prepended to this string.

globalTypeMap: string

Can be set to the location of the system-wide mailcap (type map config) file of your choice. Default is /usr/local/lib/mosaic/mailcap.

homeDocument: string

Document to access on program startup. Default is http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/.

personalTypeMap: string

Can be set to the location of the personal mailcap file of your choice -- the value of the environment variable HOME is prepended to this. Default is .mailcap.

useGlobalHistory: Boolean

If true, a global history of everywhere you visit is automatically sorted. (This history is used to shade anchors different colors based on whether you've visited the corresponding documents or not, if resource trackVisitedAnchors is set to true) Default is true.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has placed information concerning X resources on the Internet for your use.

To read more about X resources, view http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software\ /Mosaic/Docs/d2-setting-resources.html

For the entire list of NCSA Mosaic X Resources, view http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software\ /Mosaic/Docs/resources.html

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