Changing hotkeys in DOS Guide
Posted 10 May 2000; updated 18 Apr 2002
Inside Guide's "Toolbar" dialog (in the Settings menu), you can already toggle the availability of a toolbar button for a given functions in Guide. As of 12 Mar 2002, Guide 8 users can select the hotkey for a given function in Guide from the Toolbar dialog. Thus, a person interested in (say) galaxies can revise the hotkey list so as to be able to hit 'p' and get the "Go to PGC Galaxy" function, 'c' to get the "Go to Common Galaxy name" function, and so on.
DOS Guide users can't do this, but can still revise hotkeys with a little more effort. Unlike almost any "normal" software, hotkeys in Guide are set through a text file, HOTKEY.DAT. For example, the following line in HOTKEY.DAT:
Alt-C A 46 2344 A 67 2355means that when you hit Alt-C, you get "action number" 2344 in DOS Guide and 2355 in Windows Guide. (The 'A 46' and 'A 67' are used internally to Guide to decipher the key codes provided by DOS and Windows; you should leave them alone.) Usually, the action codes are the same in both versions, but not always; and as you'll see, some keys available in one version don't work in the other (because Windows "hides" certain keys that DOS can see, and vice versa). To determine what actions #2344 and #2355 are, you can look in the file TOOLBAR.DAT and find these lines:
# 2344 Printer setup (DOS) # 2355 !charon.bmp Link to Charon
From this, you can probably see how you would reset the hotkeys with a text editor. Suppose you wanted to have 'p' correspond to 'Go to PGC Galaxy'. TOOLBAR.DAT contains the following line:
# 61 !go_pgc.bmp Go to PGC galaxy
You would then find the 'P' line in HOTKEY.DAT, and add '61' to it. In this case, there would be no reason not to do so for both DOS and Windows Guide, as follows:
P 80 61 80 61
At no point should you modify TOOLBAR.DAT. Only HOTKEY.DAT should be altered.