General Options: Help, Etc.

Positioning the Help Window

VBLM can control the size and location of its Help window. The Help System Interaction options, set under General Options/Help Etc via the main options menu, determine whether and how it does so.

If Position Help Window is checked, help requests are packaged with resizing messages that fit the Help window between the edge of the screen and the edge of the calling window.

If Slide Calling Window to Left is checked, the calling window is moved to the left edge of the screen before help is requested, and the Help window is placed to its right. If not checked, the calling window is not moved and Help will be placed on whichever side is furthest from the edge of the screen.

If the width available is less than the value you set for Minimum Help Window Width, expressed as a percentage of total screen width, the Help window will be sized to this minimum.

If Position Help Window is not checked, the current size and position of the help window is not changed and the other options have no effect. All options are checked by default, though, and the minimum width is set to 35%.

Reset Suppressed Messages

Clicking this button causes all message boxes that you have suppressed by checking the Don't ask/Don't show me this again box to reappear. See Suppressing Messages and Queries for details.

Configuration File Save Method

When VBLM reads its INI file but does not find a setting for a particular option, it assigns a safe default value (as an aside, this is why I often tell users who are having weird problems to delete VBLM.INI entirely and restart, thus forcing all settings back to their defaults; weird problems almost always disappear).

As VBLM config files have grown in size and complexity along with VBLM and VB, it occurred to me that I could make them smaller and generally easier to work with by exploiting this behavior and having VBLM record only the non-default settings when it writes config files; the files shrink up to 90% but the end result is identical. Thus this is what VBLM does if the Fast Save method is selected. If Thorough Save is selected instead, VBLM will behave as it always has and write both default and non-default settings to config files.

Enable Unicode Encoding

When checked, an Encoding Method entry appears on the main file menu, which allows you tohave VBLM store and manipulate strings using Unicode encoding, instead of the default ANSI method. See VB, VBLM and Unicode and Running VBLM on non-Latin Windows for more information.

Note: When you enable or disable Unicode encoding, the change will not occur until you restart VBLM.