Two text editing questions

Dan Ingalls Dan.Ingalls at disney.com
Mon May 7 17:46:47 UTC 2001


>I've started placing links in my methods, using e.g.
>	<WeirdThing frob:withAccomplice:>
>
>There are a few things that get in my way.  I do not claim that they are
>problems for anyone else, and I do not claim that there aren't superb
>ways to deal with them already.  It's probably just my ignorance.
>
>1.  Very often one wants to select a sequence of words.
>    In MacOS,
>	1. position the cursor anywhere in the first word.
>	2. double-click.
>	3. position the cursor anywhere in the last word.
>	4. shift-double-click.
>    in Squeak, steps 1, 2, and 3 are the same, but step 4 doesn't work
>    the way the Mac has made me expect.
>
>    Is there a preference anywhere to support shift-double-click?
>    (I am slowly slogging my way through Paragraph and ParagraphEditor;
>    there are a couple of keyboard shortcuts I would like to add, but it
>    is currently beyond me.)

Richard -

Shift-click for extend has never worked this way, and there is no such preference.  However, I think it's a fine idea, and would condone such a change, and might even do it if it looked easy or I had nothing else to do ;-).  I note also that single-shift-click doesn't work right after a word select in morphic, though it does in MVC -- that should be fixed too.

>2.  When I create one of these links, by typing "<....>", selecting it,
>    and doing Cmd-6 (Alt-6 on UNIX), the angle brackets disappear.
>    I understand why.
>
>    When I need to edit such a link, I use Cmd-0 (Alt-0 on my SPARC box)
>    to turn it back into plain text.  When that happens, I *don't* get
>    the angle brackets back.
>
>    I understand how come that happens, and I can see why one might want
>    consistent "Cmd-0 erases colours and styles so that the text you have
>    is the text you see, no more no less", but that still leaves me wishing
>    for something (Ctrl-6? menu item?) that would restore the full original
>    text including the angle-bracketed link.
>
>    Perhaps this already exists and I have just failed to find it.

Sadly, no.  Again, I think it's a good idea;  I've wanted it myself.

>3.  What I have to do now is turn the link into text with Cmd-0,
>    edit the text, restore the angle brackets, select the text including
>    the angle brackets, and Cmd-6 again.
>
>    If I select the text and type Ctrl-<, it wraps angle brackets around
>    it.  Nice.  But the angle brackets are outside the selection.
>    I have the same problem when making the links in the first place:
>    clicking just inside the angle brackets selects the text between
>    the angle brackets, not the angle brackets themselves.
>
>    Is there a keystroke (maybe Ctrl-/) that says "extend the selection
>    at both ends until it includes a matching pair of brackets?
>
>    How do people normally deal with this?

>4.  On my UNIX box, when I edit a method and Alt-s save it, I sometimes
>    get a walkback because the scanner KNOWS there can't possibly be any
>    NUL (ASCII 0) characters in the method text, but there is one!  Funny
>    thing is that I don't type ctrl-space or ctrl-@ or anything else that
>    should be inserting a NUL.  Typically the NUL is the very first character.
>    
>    Why does this happen and how do I stop it?

I hope someone else has an answer for you.  I've never seen this, but I've never run Squeak on UNIX.

	- Dan






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