Enhancing VX-REXX with macros

Introduction

The VX-REXX Editor (vrxedit.exe) is itself written in VX-REXX, which means that it can be modified and extended using its own facilities. When the editor starts, and before it loads a project, the file Profile.VRM is executed - this file can be found in the Macros folder inside the VX-REXX installation directory. Basic information on how this works can be found in the VX-REXX Programmer's Guide (progguid.inf) under "VX-REXX design time macros"; this article assumes you have read those pages.

There are a number of handy tricks that are effectively undocumented. Since the editor is an ordinary VX-REXX program, and its objects are ordinary VX-REXX objects, they can be manipulated fairly readily. For instance, the menu bar is called [code]__VREMainMenuBar[/code] (internal objects seem all to have the prefix __VRE), so a new menu can be added by simply calling VRCreate.