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Moving around Selection Searching ASCII panel Undo & Repeat Binaries
Advanced editing techniquesAdvanced editing techniques
We now discuss a number of special features of Edith Pro that contribute
essentially to the added editing value of the package, and shouldn't go
unnoticed.
CREATIVE USE OF ARBITRARILY SHAPED SELECTIONS
The fragmented selection system allows you to mark
any selection of the text in a window, and all operations (except
external commands) will operate sensibly on such selections. For
example, you can enter a table of numbers, select a column, and use
Shift right (Text menu, Ctrl K) to just that column to the right. You can cut away
column 3 using Cut (Edit menu, Alt X), and use Overlay (Edit menu, Alt Shift V) to paste it back as column 5.
You can align text with Indent to column... (Text menu, Alt Shift D). You can format non-continuous
text as a paragraph using Format paragraph (Text menu, Alt Shift P). After switching on Replace mode (Mark menu, Insert),
you can erase columns using Delete (Edit menu, Alt Shift X), and overwrite columns using
Overlay (Edit menu, Alt Shift V) (instead of inserting them line by line).
REPEATING DRIBBLES ON MULTIPLE LINES
Repeat dribble (Edit menu, Ctrl R) (see Undo & Repeat), when performed on a selection consisting of
two or more lines, will repeat the recorded dribble to each line in the
selection. It takes some time to understand the details of how the
dribble recorder works, but especially when editing computer code or
tables of numbers, multiple repeat is a valuable tool.
USING SHORTCUTS
For computer languages with rather long and tedious command sequences,
such as LaTeX and HTML, text shortcuts can improve your editing
convenience and speed considerably. A shortcut is an abbreviation
(typically less than 6 letters). You type the abbreviation, then hit
Escape, and it is replaced with a longer text. These shortcuts
can freely position the cursor inside the replaced text and can ask for
parameters---strings to be substituted in the replacement. Shortcuts
can be defined in the shortcut panel.
TEXT MARKERS
Each editor window has a set of four text markers available. A
position in the text is marked with Put marker (Mark menu, Alt P). New markers appear
on the scroll bar as small black triangles. The markers are traversed
using Back (Browse menu, Alt Left) and Forward (Browse menu, Alt Right). Some functions (text home, text
end, Goto line... (Browse menu, Alt G)) create markers automatically. When all four markes are
set and an additional one is requested, the one set longest ago is
deleted first. The text marker system is also used when line numbers
are specified for a file on the command line.
SOURCE TAGS
Tags are known from the vi editor. A file tags
in the
directory of the file you are editing contains a number of keywords,
each with a way for the editor to find information linked to that
keyword.
In a sense, tags are to collections of plain text files what links
are in sets of HTML documents on the web (or the Edith on-line manual).
They are most frequently used by programmers who mark the definition of
a function, so they can go back to its definition later just by
selecting the function name where it's used in other files.
There are programs that create tags
files for you automatically.
Edith also offers Create source tag (Mark menu, Alt Shift H) to allow you to enter arbitrary tags.
Once a tag has been created for a keyword, you can jump back to it by
selecting the keyword (or usually just putting the cursor inside it) and
choosing Edit source... (Browse menu, Ctrl E).
- In contrast to standard tags implementations, the
tags
file is allowed to be higher up in the path of the text window
from which Create source tag (Mark menu, Alt Shift H) or Edit source... (Browse menu, Ctrl E) is chosen.
Index Menus Panels Troubleshooting Glossary Key glossary
Moving around Selection Searching ASCII panel Undo & Repeat Binaries