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To undo and to do again

To undo and to do again

As usual, the operation Undo (Edit menu, Alt U) is there to recover after making a mistake. It will undo the last operation performed, or in case of ordinary typing on one line, whatever has changed on that line since you started typing there.

Selecting Undo twice is equivalent to doing nothing. Edith does not know a redo command as found in many other text editing software. To recover from a more complex mistake, use the trash buffer.

Undo is often only available in the window you last worked in. This is because all text windows share a bit of memory (a buffer) that stores the information needed for recovery.

USING THE TRASH BUFFER

For the sake of simplicity, Edith has the concept `undo plus undo is equivalent to doing nothing'. This has the disadvantage that as soon as you make two subsequent mistakes, there is no easy way to recover the old text. However, in most of the cases, this data will be available under Trash buffer (Windows menu, Shift Ctrl T). The trash buffer contains all material that the Undo (Edit menu, Alt U) function has had to remove earlier. The old text can be selected, and dragged-and-dropped back to the original window easily.

In many cases, the trash buffer system turns out to be more versatile than a so-called multi-stage undo system. The most common example is: you type some good text (A), remove it by accident, then type a lot of good text (B). To get text A back in a multi-stage undo system, all of B would be lost.

THE DRIBBLE RECORDER

When you are typing, your actions are continuously being recorded. Recording starts when you type or delete a character, and then records subsequent typing, cursor motion and deletion on the same line. Recording stops automatically when (1) you move to a different line, (2) choose some non-line based operation or (3) walk left-then-right, or right-then-left. When recording stops automatically, cursor motion at the end of the recorded sequence is discarded. Recording can be switched on/off manually with the Rec button in the status/input line; this may be necessary if you wish a recording to begin or end in cursor motion operations.

The recording can be played back using Repeat dribble (Edit menu, Ctrl R). Three recordings can be saved under keyboard combinations Alt 1, 2, 3 using Store dribble (Edit menu, Ctrl T).

It is possible to play back a dribble over several lines simultaneously; just select the lines and Repeat dribble (Edit menu, Ctrl R).


Index  Menus  Panels  Troubleshooting  Glossary  Key glossary
Moving around  Selection  Searching  Undo & Repeat  Advanced  Binaries