That further means, that it's only machine and not human-readable other than from within the NextBASIC Editor. These two dot commands allow NextBASIC to be exported to a text file to be edited by a more specialised programmer's editor, or shared with other, non Sinclair computers and imported back in a form that the NextBasic Editor can understand.

.browse One of the nicest features of the Browser is its built-in file dialogs. .browse allows these to be used within your NextBASIC programs and pass the selected file to a string variable in your program saving immense amounts of time from programming menu-based navigation.

.defrag NextZXOS provides a streaming API which can be used for audio or video. If the files however are not defragmented, streaming is interrupted. .defrag solves this problem rearranging the file in question to be in one, continuous, piece.

.editprefs /.browseprefs NextZXOS's native customisers for the editor and the browser.

.guide .gde is the official documentation NextZXOS file format and NextGuide is its viewer. It's a hypertext viewer partially compatible with the Amiga Guide Format

.install/.uninstall These are the dot commands to install and remove drivers like for example the mouse driver from the system. NextZXOS provides a driver API, which you can use to write your own drivers which is used in conjunction with the new DRIVER command.

.lfn This is a very special use case command; its sole purpose is to return the long file name for a short (8+3) filename. .lfn does not work on IDEDOS/+3DOS drives, or rather it does work but returns the same name as +3DOS drives only accept 8+3 filenames.

.mem Returns the free memory for NextZXOS and NextBASIC use

.nextver Assigns the current version of NextZXOS to a variable we specify.

.unzip Native decompressor for .zip archives

Notes

Any errors generated by a NextZXOS dot command generate an error code of 255 (Dot
Command Error) which can be read with the ERROR. ERROR$ and ERROR TO
commands. Refer to Chapter 1 for details.

Modifying the startup – Autoexec.bas

NextZXOS provides you with a very fast way to set up your NextBASIC and NextZXOS environment upon boot by using commands stored in a special file called autoexec.bas located inside the c:/nextzxos/ folder. The same rules apply as with regular SAVE, meaning you will need to give a LINE parameter to save it before it can auto execute. If you omit the LINE parameter, the commands will auto load upon boot but won't execute. For example to set up a red background with bright white letters upon boot: