The line number changes whether the text is viewed in word wrap mode or not, allowing both types of quick search.
To go to an absolute (unfragmented) line number (or paragraph) when in word wrap mode, enter the known number and stroke the Ctrl+Enter keys when ready. When in word wrap mode the control gets the same (custom) background color of the editor frame, otherwise it gets the Status Bar color.
The counters for the Undo / Redo open actions are visible into the popup menu: e.g.
Undo | [48]; clicking these commands there, the popup menu will not close, but it will assume a proper vertical position, just horizontally sliding if you click to the right or left of the vertical bar character; so that you can adapt your view. The Undo / Redo stack is preserved even after saving the document, while it is lost on change from-to the RichEdit view mode, i.e. for the syntax fonts-colours.
Date_Time dynamic insertion
The powerful Find /Replace dialog
When the |
±Tab| button is checked, all searches will start from the Top and every next file will be automatically searched until all Tabs are seeked according to the options setting, as the final report shows. This process applies to every pair of string to Find / Replace, when the stack of a batch file is parsed
(see details).
For a quick, single search of the first occurrence of any string, hold down the Ctrl key while launching the Find Next command and the dialog will immediately close after searching.
The
(4) fourth option is related to the Bookmarks functionalities, allowing to gather the pointers to the next 10 occurrences of a defined string, tag or identifier. When pushed, the Circlet button starts a search for the defined target following the “Find” rules and, rather than replacing anything, it stores every index found as a bookmark in a new ordered sequence, to be
used by the buttons and jumpers described in the The View Editor special Tools.
Note that alike for the normal Find[/Replace] command, with the |
±Tab| button enabled the bookmarks search covers all the loaded files, providing for each one the buttons update, what makes very easy to trace any special tag or expression through the entire site.
As for the normal replacement strings, to the wildcard patterns the |
Keep Case| option, that toggles the |
Match Case| one as complementary, will retain the upper and lower case of the target in every byte of the replacing sequence.
Alike the “Find/Replace on disk” dialog of the ListView environment, the stack of both F&R parameters can be saved and loaded through the tool bar popup menu.
|
The window's interactive counters.
The V/Editor Status Bar is used to show generic information about the window, mostly allowing the user to interact with. From left to right we find 3 text edit controls where these parameters are up-to-date:
- for the Line number;
- for the index, or insertion point or caret position;
- for the screen width.
In addition each of these frames accepts values for the keyboard, jumping to the wanted line number, or to the byte position into the document, or resizing the editor's frame for an exact value, used to reproduce the final frame size of a document in order to test fonts and layout. The Track-Bar Font resizing if described in the view_editor chapter.
The HTML Tags list and Popup menu.
The first aid to the webmaster, or the creator of a page - as well as to other programming activities - is given by the immediate availability of the HTML tags list, i.e. the full syntax, not only to keep them in sight, but also for rapid access and automated insertion into the text, both of single and double tags as well as of preset scripts or expressions of any kind.
Since every author may like better different settings for distinct tasks, this facility needs to be updatable, even interchangeable in real time, that is with less work than typing an instruction. Starting from any text file that contains one prepared list, this is given twice:
- by a dialog .(1), where to list the whole standard set and more, so that any tag line can always be selectable from the combo .(2), to be pasted into the document clicking the |Format Selected Text| button. This List being numbered, the simple row number in the text box followed by a Line Feed can insert that Tag formatting the text to the caret position.
- by a popup menu .(4) (Right-click the text area), where you may load the most recurrent tags or expressions: it is faster in use since selecting one item types it into the document, formatting the selected text: both process can set a double tag (separated by a comma) before and after any selected string, or put the single tag before the string or replace it according to the custom setting.
Furthermore they can hold an accessory string to be put into the clipboard for to repeatedly paste it, separated by the '•' character (ASCII 149); e.g. the parameter line:
<ol>/@<li>•<LI>
inserts the tags:
"<ol>
<li>"
(note the /@ Line Feed symbol effect) and lets the user paste one or more <LI> anywhere else until the clipboard buffer is replaced. A Question mark inside the string forces the Editor to paste the clipboard content to its place: e.g. a file name copied Alt_clicking any tab Label will automatically complete the <A HREF="?.htm"> tag.
This instruction set can be replaced in any moment through a dialog.(4) (middle in the main image), handled by the last command of the popup menu itself. Although scrolling, it is advisable hereby to keep the number of rows into the limit of the screen height.
This list of words:
"
<BR>
<HR>
<P ALIGN=>,</P>
<u>,</u>
-
into a text file is sufficient to create an active portion of the interchangeable popup menu, as is visible in the figure.
As you can see observing both Dialog buttons, each dialog is able to accept new tags entered into the text box, or delete tags from the loaded list. This means that they may be used to update each other, choosing from the extended list the hot items to be copied into the popup menu, or updating the first recording every new meaningful expression.
Enough to copy /paste and confirm, to update the respective files in real time.
To make it a very powerful compact tool, a ultimate feature has been added, simple and efficient: besides interacting with countless sets of syntax commands and tags, the user can now create with the greatest ease menu items that hold their own group of tags, i.e. every popup menu can hold from each line (or family, or class etc.) a 2nd level popup menu, limited only by the display properties. To put under the fingers this grapes, or wide fans of instructions, you need to edit a plain-text list of strings, one line for each one as above, just marking the introductory section names with the character | § | as the first byte: i. e.
§section
then every assigned sub item line must follow, starting with the (dot) character, like | .item |.
All such strings, included separator lines | .- | and blank lines | . | until no dot is found, will belong to that list (more details into the context-help).
For example:
"
§Headings
.<H1>,</H1>
.<H2>,</H2>
.<H3>,</H3>
.-
.<H4>,</H4>
.<H5>,</H5>
.<H6>,</H6>
-
will create the “Headings” sub menu with 6 items in two distinct groups.
The Quick Editor Popup menu.
The first item of the Popup menu introduces a new set of commonly used commands (which can be directly opened by Ctrl·Right-click) related to the editor area handling. Most are auto explanatory; everyone is described, as for the buttons and the various clickable areas of any window, by a detailed context help activated by the correspondent button (right footer of the main window).
The Editor's Options sub-menu lets you combine some helpful tools to the upgrading of any kind of code or text: besides the full text style and the manual paragraphs Indentation, the special || for delimited areas of the document, all useable without affecting the code browsing or running.
It is a strong help to distinguish e.g. nested portions of code in large pages or to sustain the extreme programming strategy; therefore both the popup-menu || command and the Shift_INS keystroke allow to paste any stream mantaining the whole source Fonts and/or Colors, while the Crtl_V keystroke is enabled to convert any string to the Font set to the insertion point.
Such temporary layout can be recycled by the command: ||, that allows to save any document in a temporary Rich Text Format, automatically reverting to the executable code on reload, while keeping the last custom visual format.
An external double clipboard for manipulating or store Plain or Rich Text streams, to aid recurrent copy-paste can be opened-closed independently whenever useful.
An advanced feature allows to insert the Date of the day in two helpful ways:
- by your default format, set into the INI file.
- by your local format, set into the text by a string like: "MMM-DD-YYYY", where every byte-pattern will be replaced by true data, according to its evident meaning and size; the string, as for some simple rules detailed into the context-Help, can be composed with the caps of the words:
Month, Day, Year, Week day, Time in whatever order you want they to appear. W and T have a full fixed format, so one single byte is needed.
Some examples:
- "W, MMM-DD-YYYY T" types
"Wednesday, Nov-02-2005 17:03", while
- "MMMMMMMMMMMM-D-YY Th" types out
"November-2-05 17:57h",
trimming the trailing spaces; and
- "MM/DD/YYYY - W" types out
" 01/05/2006 - Thursday" As you can see, any format should be accepted, in that spaces or delimiters of your choice can be inserted between patterns. To type the Date press Ctrl + H: if no [valid] string is highlighted, the default one will be submitted.
One more special mention to the Undo /Redo features: you can choose if to change/unchange by single byte steps, when possible, or by whole strings; this option may be switched at any time (Ctrl-N), with effect on subsequent changes. At the same time, while the Ctrl-BACKSPACE key erases one whole word at a time, using Ctrl_Alt-BACKSPACE (or Alt Gr key) with the caret positioned to the end of any HTML Tag, will cancel the whole Tag backward, that is any string or expression included with the HTML Tag delimiters <>.
The same applies to the CANCEL key, forward.
To Find/Replace.
A first description of the Find /Replace utility has been introduced about the File Search by string. The F/Rep. features are very advanced; besides being the dialog extendible for very long strings, you can:
- find and replace whole paragraphs inside any document, even if they contain one or more Line Feeds or paragraph end, (can be automatically got from a text selection, or entered as /@), and
- define both Find and Replace strings with [customizable] wildcards (when patterns are in the Replace string, the string-to-find lenght must match).
- When a text selection is highlighted (not the string to find) the find/replacement will be automatically limited to this area; the |Up| or |Down| buttons will start the search from the current caret position toward the end of that selection - or end of the page if no selection is given - in either directions.
- The Replace actions can be performed in three modes, all with a final detailed report:
.(1) fast mode:
the immediate |ReplaceAll| button
gets the final result, for one or all the loaded files;
.(2) mediate mode:
|ReplaceAll ž|
(despite to the figure (2), this pushes as a whole button, as it is visible in the image above).
This mode allows the user to follow every change, in that every string found is left visible for a delay configured by the user, able to observe what's going on; he has no control on the performed actions (except to Escape the command), but can watch every step when it is needful to prevent surprises; moreover, while any global change can only be undone as a whole and in certain conditions, this mode allows, like the following, every change to be undone in the reverse order;
.(3) manual mode:
at every occurrence it is the user to decide if to |Replace This| or |Find Next|; on each Replace choice, the routine jumps to the next occurrence after a while.
Finally, it is possible to || and || in any moment the double list of the Find and Replace parameters - through the system Menu of the FIND/REPLACE dialog - so that all kinds of extensive jobs could be recovered or recycled whenever needed; besides, these data can be converted into a batch F/R file.
Refer to the inside page for details and the aid to search for encoded and hyphenated words.
One more option:
the cyclic string replacement
Due to our job, strings to be searched for updates could result hyphenated into a document, making very uneasy to find them out; it is provided then to identify them as normal plain text, whatever their syllabication might be: just while clicking the |Search files| button hold down:- the Left Alt key to seek for hyphenated words only, or
- the Right Alt key (Alt Gr) to seek both for normal and hyphenated words;
i. e. if you are looking for the word " commonly", that exists into a document with the hyphenated format: "com-mon-ly", (or any, independently by the hyphenation rule) with this option it can be recognized, the file checked and, when the |Listing| option is enabled, displayed into the Log's frame as a pointer to its line into the document, where you can immediately Jump by the Ctrl-J command.
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Feb. 16-2007