Customizing Your Logo Environment

Logo has many commands that allows you to adapt it to both your particular computer equipment and to your personal preferences. You can change Logo's appearance and operation as you wish either temporarily from within Logo or store your preferences to record them permanently. Once your preferences are in a disk file, you can adjust your Logo loading procedure to adapt Logo to your wishes every time it loads.

Personalizing Logo

There are many commands from within Logo that change its appearance and operation. If you discover you are repeatedly changing certain aspects of Logo to suit your preferences, you may want to record these changes in a file so that Logo incorporates them automatically for you.

For example, numerical precision, the Logo prompt, and the effect of the function keys are all system names that can be changed as you wish. There are commands to determine graphics scaling, the default number of turtles, colors, and case sensitivity among others.

INIT.LGO

When Logo loads, it automatically looks for a file named INIT.LGO. If that file is present in the Logo startup directory, Logo loads the file and executes any commands that it contains. If yo have any commands you would like Logo to execute every time it loads, you can record them in the INIT.LGO file. For example, if you want Logo text to appear as white text on black background rather than default black text on white background, you can install the command SETATTR 15 in the INIT.LGO file. You can also include frequently used utility procedures in INIT.LGO and they are automatically defined in your workspace when Logo loads. An INIT.LGO file can be created with the Logo editor.

Startup Files

A startup file is similar to INIT.LGO, but its application is slightly more specific. While Logo loads INIT.LGO automatically if it is present, startup files are loaded only when you specify. You can use a startup file to setup an environment that you use sometimes but not every time you use Logo.

Any Logo text file can be used as a startup file. To load a startup file when Logo loads, create a command line within the Program Manager with the name of the startup file as a parameter.

Identifying Logo Files

You can also use the File Manager to start Logo. To do this inform the File Manager that all files with the .LGO extension belong to Logo. You can do this by editing the file WIN.INI in the Windows directory. In the section [Extensions] add the following entry:

lgo=C:\WINLOGO\LOGO.EXE ^.lgo

If Logo is in a different directory than C:\WINLOGO, you should substitute this directory name in the command above. This command tells File manager to start Logo every time a file with the extension .LGO is double-clicked. With Windows 3.1, run the following command from the Program Manager:

REGEDIT C:\WINLOGO\LOGO.REG

This records all necessary information for File Manager in the Windows registration database. To start Logo, however, you should include the Logo program path in your PATH variable.