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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