March 95 - MPW TIPS AND TRICKS
MPW TIPS AND TRICKS
Launching MPW Faster Than a Speeding Turtle
TIM MARONEY
One myth about MPW is that it's slow, but that's an unfair description. Personally, I
think "glacial" would be a more appropriate word, or perhaps "executionally
challenged." However, it's possible to speed it up in a variety of ways, such as
simulating the 68020 instruction set on a fully loaded Cray. On a tighter budget, you
can improve MPW's launch time just by making some minor changes to your
configuration.
Perhaps some of you are asking, "Who cares about launch time? Compile speed is the
important thing! God built the whole world in less time than it takes me to compile my
project with PPCC, and he only had a slide rule!" It's a valid objection, and I'm glad
you brought it up, but many people launch MPW more often than they compile. Quite a
few projects use MPW as a development workhorse because of its scripting and source
control capabilities, but compile and link using language systems that aren't laboring
under the delusion that they're getting paid by the hour.
I didn't invent this technique, but I've tuned it up and eliminated some trouble
spots. The original was distributed on a Developer CD so old that I can't find it now. *
STATES' RITES
The trick is simple and capitalizes on an important fact about MPW tools. Because of
the innovative approach MPW takes to the traditional TTY interface, it's easy to
execute the output of tools by selecting the output with the mouse and pressing the
Enter key. Tool writers are strongly encouraged to write executable commands as their
output. Since some of the tool writers didn't get the message, there are umpty-million
exceptions, but when the tool does the right thing it's very useful.
There's an even better way to select the output, which is to press Command-Z
twice after running the tool, but don't say I told you so. On the Macintosh, Undo
followed by Redo is supposed to return you to your original state. *
The nice people responsible for the Set, Export, Alias, AddMenu, SetKey, CheckOutDir,
and MountProject commands followed MPW policy and made them reversible: giving
these commands without parameters dumps a list of commands that you can execute