Lotus Agenda FAQ.

• Q. How can I discard all Done items?

• A. Create a new Show view with /Utilities Show ItemsDone, then Mark all items by pressing F7 on the category header. Now /Item Discard will offer to discard all marked items.

  I think this is a good idea every once in a while, because if you have too many done items, queries seem to slow down.

• Q. The installer complains about registering disks.
• A. The free disk images from Lotus include some form of copy protection. You can’t just extract the files - you need to emulate a floppy drive. If you don’t want to bother with that, there’s a preinstalled ZIP available here.

• Q. Some of the default keystrokes are difficult to enter today, like Alt-F4.
• A. You can rebind keys using a Macro.
  1. Open the Macro Manager, Alt-F3.
  2. Press Ins to create a new Macro, call it “Macro”
  3. Press F2 to open the editor, and enter this:

  {Macro}
  {AltF4}

  4. Press F5 to save it, then F6 to open the macro properties.
  5. Select “Attach to key”, Press F2 and enter {CtlF4}.
  6. Now you can use Ctrl-F4 instead of Alt-F4. You can do the same thing to other bindings that you don’t like.

I made Ctrl-S Save, and Ctrl-F Find. The defaults are Alt-W (??) And Alt-F6 (???!).

• Q. I can’t enter Alt-F3 in my terminal, so I can’t rebind keys!
• A. Download SCANCODE.COM from here, it’s a DOS TSR that can simulate keystrokes. Once you have it installed:
  1. Press F10, Select Utilities, then Launch
  2. Type SCANCODE Delay 3,Alt-F3 (If SCANCODE is not in your %PATH%, type the full path, e.g. C:\SCANCODE\SCANCODE.COM.
  3. After a few seconds, the Macro Manager will appear. I would suggest rebinding it to Ctrl-F3, so you don’t have to do that everytime!

• Q. When I exit agenda, try to print something, or run external commands I get an error like EInternal Error.
• A. Add the line $_umb_a0 = (off) to your .dosemurc.

• Q. When I run Agenda, it looks garbled like this.
• A. You are using DOSEMU with a non-standard text mode. Here are some possible solutions, pick whichever one you prefer.
  • Before starting DOSEMU, type stty cols 80.
    • If you use an unusual terminal (like Windows Terminal), you might get an error like Operation not supported. A workaround is to install xtermcontrol and type xtermcontrol --geometry=80x${LINES}.
  • Use GNU screen, and create a layout for DOS applications (this is what I do, see the next question).

• Q. Can I see your GNU screen configuration to get me started?

• A. Sure, here’s my main screenrc, and here’s my dosemu specific one.

  I use alias agenda="screen -c ${HOME}/.screenrc.dosemu dosemu -term -E agenda" in my .bashrc to start agenda.

• Q. Can I see your DOSEMU configuration to get me started?
• A. Sure, here.

• Q. Agenda uses 100% CPU time while idle, which is stopping my CPU from entering low power states. How do I fix that?
• A. Update DOSEMU, I filed an issue and a fix was committed.

• Q. Agenda doesn’t use 100% CPU time, but it still uses more than I would like.

• A. DOSEMU simulates timer interrupts using setitimer(), and by default it requests them as quickly as possible. If the DOS application does a lot of work on every interrupt (Agenda queries the time), then it can use some CPU.

  There’s a tradeoff here, you can simulate a slower interrupt timer but responsiveness will go down (i.e. how quickly the application responds to keyboard input). You can experiment with the numbers and find the optimal balance.

  If you were playing a DOS game, you would probably want it high, but for an office application like Agenda you can turn responsiveness waaaaay down and it’s still totally acceptable.

  To do that, set the timer option. The default value is 18, but I find 8 to be totally acceptable, maybe even 6. You can only change the timer setting on the commandline, not in .dosemurc.

  $ dosemu -term -I "timer 8" -E "C:\AGENDA\AGENDA.EXE"

  The lower you can set this value, the lower CPU time agenda will use.

• Q. I get an error like “Error: A.EXE not found”.
• A. Agenda is not in your %PATH%, add a line like path %PATH%;C:\AGENDA to one of your initialization files, like fdppauto.bat.

• Q. I’m using GNU screen, and some function keys produce garbage.

• A. S-Lang tries to check if you’re using an xterm compatible terminal by doing strncmp($TERM, "xterm", 5);. GNU screen is xterm compatible, but it sets the terminal to screen.xterm-256color.

  A workaround is to just make an alias for this termcap entry that starts with “xterm”. First, get a copy of the termcap entry, e.g.

  $ TERM=screen.xterm-256color infocmp > termcap.txt

  Now, add an alias at the top of the file that starts with xterm, e.g. I made mine look like this:

  screen.xterm-256color|xterm-256color.screen|GNU Screen with xterm using 256 colors,

  Now recompile it, tic termcap.txt. tic automatically installs that entry in your $HOME/.termcap directory, so it should be available immediately. Now add the line term xterm-256color.screen to your .screenrc, and the problem should be solved.

• Q. I’m using GNU screen, it works but the Escape key seems slow, unreliable, or needs to be pressed twice?

• A. First add the line maptimeout 50 to your screenrc, and see if that helps. If it feels better but not fixed, try tweaking the number.

  If it didn’t help at all, then I think your termcap definition is wrong. Perhaps you are using a terminal that claims to be xterm compatible, but is not.

  Try these steps:

  1. Decompile your current termcap entry, $ infocmp -1 > termcap.txt
  2. Find the line that starts kmous= and remove it, that’s mouse event reporting. I’ve found this unreliable in some vte-based terminals.
  3. Recompile it, $ tic termcap.txt.

  See if that fixes the problem. tic places compiled definitions in your $HOME/.termcap directory, you can remove them if you want to go back.

• Q. How can I print something from Agenda?

• A. Add the line $_lpt1 = "dosprint" to your .dosemurc, then create this shell script in your $PATH called dosprint, you can adjust to your liking. The ps2pdfwr utility is part of ghostscript.

    #!/bin/bash
    declare tmpfile=$(mktemp --tmpdir=${HOME}/Downloads --suffix=.pdf printjob.XXX)
    if ps2pdfwr - ${tmpfile} > /dev/null; then
        xdg-open "${tmpfile}"
    else
        rm -f ${tmpfile}
    fi

• Q. Can I see a sample of Agenda generated PostScript and/or a sample PDF?
• A. Sure, here is some PostScript, and here is a PDF.