> Can a new directive be added to the F9 application menu items, that causes
> the menu item to be viewed instead of being executed, equivalent to the
> current Alt-View command.

I currently use Alt+Edit and Alt+View to solve this problem, but wouldn't
including a 'REM #ZTview' line in many scripts be a lot of work? It's also
polluting pure text (like your tables), if you export them, for example.
It appears it will create a lot of maintenance work, IMO. Why not
implement what you want outside the item body?

Some time ago I've sent to Kim a long list of F9 ZEPs, including
extending what is *already* there just a little bit and obtaining
some interesting benefits. It's no-ZEP time, so I'll just mention
something related to your request:

Currently, as in FW/DW, F9 knows how to jump to items starting with a
letter/number, and that's it. Note that you cannot access items like

#How to setup Distiller
#Adding servers to hosts file
!TODO fssdfsdfsdfsf
!WORK asfsdfsfsf asfsf fsfdf
@Export this ZDB now (Ctrl+Enter)

directly, but in DW/FW you can jump to such dirs/files! In F9 you need
to look for them and navigate, and with macros it's not easy to reach
all such items reliably.

Phase 1
=======

I suggested adding support for jumping to ALL printable characters, ie,
all those accepted when naming F9 items. Maybe even graphics box-drawing ones.
This set of characters largely surpasses that of legal file names and is
probably very easy to implement in code by relaxing range-checking. It has
absolutely no impact on anything outside F9 and would not take more than
a coffee break for Kim to implement, IMO :-)

Once this becomes available, I see huge possibilities for adding simple KEYs
to DATABASE items:

[one-char-key] Item name goes here...

Of course, every item that has any name (even starting with a space) already
has a KEY, by definition, and today the valid keys are 0-9 and A-Z (only).

I use !, #, and a few others to tag items that are not executable, for example.
I use Alt+Edit and Alt+View on them. Still, I sometimes hit Enter as well.
It would be nice if ZTree prevented this (or behaved differently) in these cases!

It's up to you to use [ ] { } = + ^ and all the others as you like, but
there should be right away some reserved ones that we should argree upon, IMO.
We could all play with this for a few months in order to come up with
reasonable conventions for 'keying' (or 'tagging') items into different
classes. Obviously, we have two broad classes of items today to start with:
executable and non-executable, but this open-ended...

Does anybody use the first character of the item name for anything special?
If not, Ben and Laurent, start now :-)

Phase 2
=======

This takes more time and effort and can wait while we play with item KEYs
as they are today. Hopefully, the 0-9A-Z barrier will be broken soon :-)

What I'm proposing is having ZTree treat that first character in a special
way, the way scripts treat # ; ! :: REM, and so on. (Of course, one should
still be able to use it as a navigation shortcut!)

So, in your case, you could just name your tables:

# ASCII 0-127
# ASCII 128-256

and hitting Enter would do the ACTION ASSOCIATED WITH THE '#' KEY,
whatever it is (TYPE it, View it, Do nothing, Mail it, Print it, etc.)

A very fast and easy implementation, as proof of concept, would be, say,
for '#' to be equivalent to the current Alt+V: after the user hits
Enter (or its variants) *and* the item starts with '#', ZTree would
interpret it as Alt+V -- but, no @ECHO OFF would be added and no parsing
performed. This is what Ben wants, I believe.

Note that by simply prefixing an executable item (buggy, destrucive)
with '#' you may also be protecting yourself from trouble...

We could start with the '#' KEY as the most obvious. Once the habit
is there, new usages will be found for this simple yet powerful
mechanism.

Usage example
=============

Actually, I've been using for several years KEYs in F9 in some macros
as proof of concept:

http://vujnovic.free.fr/ztw/ztw_macros.html#Macro_9

Simply, I use '9' as a KEY to jump to items starting with '9'. I know
where these items are and control how many of them there are. One just
needs to be careful not to add too many of them and/or to move them
around, because these KEYs are accessed sequentially. And it works great!

I also have a macro that jumps to the first 'S' item . I moved the item
around and the macro found another 'S' item and was broken.

With KEY=[0-9] the risks are smaller, but using obscure special characters
for KEYs and a few conventions would eliminate then altogether.

Summary
=======

Even as it is today, ZTree allows direct access to *any* item ('record') in
the current ZTW_MENU.DAT file ('database') by first-character-stepping method
('record-key'). It works!

Breaking the 0-9A-Z barrier would help navigation greatly.

Treating certain KEYs (a better name may be needed...) in special ways
would add very interesting possibilities.

There is much more to ZEP for in the database, outliner, program launcher
that F9 is, but it can wait...