ok, got it. thanks for the many ways. grabbing the widget and dropping it on the rhs of an assignment seems most direct. my problem was that (apparently) inspecting a widget doesn't yield a straightforward specification of how to refer to it. For example, the inspector opens with the title "a BookMorph(1559)" but the book's reference after drag-and-drop is "book1559".

e

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ned Konz [mailto:ned at bike-nomad.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001, 8:16 PM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [beginner] assign widget to variable?
> 
> On Tuesday 04 December 2001 07:19 pm, morphic wrote:
> > once you drag a widget out and place it somewhere, is there a way to assign
> > it to a variable so that you can then send it messages? I realize you can
> > create things with openInWorld, and that you can do a lot of things via
> > halos and menus, but I also want to be able to send messages via a line of
> > code to things already dragged out. e
> 
> You can do this easily in a workspace.
> 
> From its menu, check "create textual references for dropped morphs". Then 
> drop a Morph on the workspace. It will slide back to where it was, leaving 
> its name (bound to the Morph in the Workspace's private dictionary).
> 
> From there you can write code in the Workspace to use it.
> 
> There is also the clipboard; you can copy a Morph to the clipboard and refer 
> to it as
>        ActiveHand pasteBuffer
> 
> Or you can do something like (if you know there's only one of your kind of 
> Morph about):
> 
>     MyMorphClass allInstances first
> 
> or
>      MyMorphClass someInstance
> 
> -- 
> Ned Konz
> currently: Stanwood, WA
> email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
> homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com
> 
>