Cygnus Ed Professional ---------------------- Contents 1 NOTICES 9 1.1 Copyrights.....................................................9 1.2 Restrictions...................................................9 1.3 Attributes.....................................................9 1.4 Warranties....................................................10 1.5 A Word About Back Ups And Other Copying.......................10 2 INTRODUCTION 11 2.1 Product Overview..............................................11 2.2 Disk Contents.................................................12 2.3 The Manual....................................................13 2.4 System Requirements...........................................13 2.5 Making a Backup...............................................13 3 GETTING STARTED 15 3.1 Starting CygnusEd Professional From The Workbench.............15 3.2 Starting CygnusEd Professional From The CLI...................15 3.3 A First Look..................................................16 3.4 Moving Around.................................................16 3.5 Editing an Existing File......................................18 3.6 Simple Editing................................................18 3.6.1 Adding Text............................................18 3.6.2 Deleting Text..........................................19 3.7 Saving Your Work..............................................20 3.8 Exiting CygnusEd Professional.................................20 4 INTRODUCING SOME ADVANCED EDITING FUNCTIONS 21 4.1 Search And Replace............................................21 4.1.1 Searching for Text.....................................21 4.1.2 UC==LC.................................................21 4.1.3 Wild Cards.............................................22 4.1.4 Direction..............................................22 4.1.5 Only Words.............................................23 4.1.6 Shortcuts In The Search Requester......................23 4.1.7 Replacing Text.........................................23 4.2 Cutting And Pasting...........................................24 4.3 Using Multiple Views And Files................................25 4.3.1 Definitions............................................25 4.3.2 Using Multiple Views...................................26 4.3.3 Using Multiple Files...................................27 4.4 Printing Your File............................................28 5 MENU COMMANDS 31 5.1 Project Menu..................................................31 5.1.1 About..................................................31 5.1.2 Clear..................................................31 5.1.3 Open New...............................................31 5.1.4 Open...................................................32 5.1.5 Include File...........................................32 5.1.6 Save Block.............................................32 5.1.7 Save...................................................32 5.1.8 Save As................................................33 5.1.9 Save all changes.......................................33 5.1.10 Change Current Directory...............................33 5.1.11 Print Block............................................33 5.1.12 Print File.............................................34 5.1.13 Quit...................................................34 5.1.14 Save And Quit..........................................34 5.1.15 Quit And Die...........................................34 5.2 Global Parameters Menu (Under Environment)....................35 5.2.1 Screen Height..........................................35 5.2.2 Screen Width...........................................35 5.2.3 Force Custom Screen....................................35 5.2.4 Macros/Key Definitions.................................35 5.2.5 Priority...............................................36 5.2.6 Autosave...............................................36 5.2.7 Set Icon Tool Name.....................................37 5.2.8 Change Colors..........................................37 5.2.9 Do Safe Saves..........................................37 5.2.10 Icon Creation..........................................38 5.2.11 HOT Start..............................................38 5.2.12 Auto-Expand Views......................................39 5.2.13 Keypad = Movement......................................39 5.2.14 Load And Save Environment..............................40 5.3 File Settings (Under Environment).............................40 5.3.1 Tab Size...............................................40 5.3.2 Customize Tabs.........................................41 5.3.3 Set Right Border.......................................41 5.3.4 Set Scroll Jump........................................42 5.3.5 Layout.................................................42 5.3.6 Word Wrap..............................................43 5.3.7 Insert Mode............................................43 5.3.8 Tabs = Spaces..........................................43 5.4 View Parameters...............................................43 5.4.1 Status Line............................................44 5.4.2 White Spaces...........................................44 5.4.3 Scroll Bar.............................................45 5.4.4 Set Scroll Borders.....................................45 5.5 Special Menu..................................................45 5.5.1 View Operations........................................45 5.5.2 Format.................................................46 5.5.3 DOS/ARexx Interface....................................47 5.5.4 Enter ASCII............................................48 5.5.5 Center Cursor..........................................48 5.5.6 Center Line............................................48 5.5.7 Repeat Key/Menu........................................48 5.5.8 Find Matching Bracket..................................49 5.5.9 Mark Location N And Jump To Mark N.....................49 5.6 Cut/Paste Menu................................................50 5.6.1 Block Commands.........................................50 5.6.2 Delete Word And Undelete Word..........................51 5.6.3 Line Commands..........................................51 5.7 Search And Replace Menu.......................................52 5.7.1 Search Commands........................................52 5.7.2 Replace Commands.......................................53 5.7.3 Change Case Commands...................................54 5.8 Move Menu.....................................................54 5.8.1 Jump To Line...........................................54 5.8.2 Jump To Auto-Line......................................54 6 KEYBOARD COMMANDS AND SHORTCUTS 57 6.1 Menu Use From The Keyboard....................................57 6.2 Use Of The Cursor Keys........................................58 6.3 Screen Shifting...............................................59 6.4 Using Requesters With the Keyboard............................59 6.5 Auto-Indent...................................................60 6.6 Using The Mouse...............................................60 6.7 Built-in Escapes Sequence Macros..............................61 6.8 Tips for Alphabetic Accents...................................62 7 USE OF THE FILE REQUESTER 65 7.1 Description...................................................65 7.2 Controlling the File Requester With the Keyboard..............66 7.3 With the Menu.................................................67 8 STORING PREFERRED SETTINGS 69 9 USING MACROS EFFECTIVELY 71 10 ADVANCED TOPICS 75 10.1 HOT Keys And Dormancy.........................................75 10.2 Starting CygnusEd Professional With Multiple Files............77 10.3 Using the Columnar Block effectively..........................78 10.3.1 Shifting Text Horizontally.............................78 10.3.2 Making Multi-Column Text Files.........................78 10.4 Converting Tabs And Spaces With Print Functions...............79 11 THE DOS/ARexx INTERFACE 81 11.1 Description...................................................81 11.2 Sending Commands to ARexx.....................................82 11.3 Executing DOS Commands from CygnusEd Professional.............83 11.3.1 Using Change Current Directory With DOS Commands.......84 11.4 Receiving Commands From ARexx.................................85 11.4.1 Menu Commands..........................................85 11.4.2 Special ARexx Functions................................87 11.5 What Do The Error Numbers Mean?...............................93 11.6 Sending Commands to CED From Other Languages..................94 12 TECHNICAL INFORMATION 99 13 ED - THE CygnusEd Professional ACTIVATOR 101 14 RecoverCedFiles - DISASTER INSURANCE 103 15 TECHNICAL SUPPORT SERVICES 105 15.1 Technical Support............................................105 15.2 Network Support..............................................105 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============= Chapter 1 NOTICES ============= 1.1 Copyrights CygnusEd Professional is copyrighted 1988 by CygnusSoft Software. CygnusEd Professional User's Manual is copyrighted 1988 by CygnusSoft Software and ASDG Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. This doc file however does not fall under these copyrights. 1.2 Restrictions The contents may not, in whole or in part, be copied, photocopied, reproduced, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form, stored in any retrieval system, or translated into any human or machine language without prior consent in writing from CygnusSoft Software and ASDG Incorporated. 1.3 Attributions Amiga, KickStart, and WorkBench are trademarks of Commodore-Amiga, Inc. ARexx is a product by William Hawes. FaccII is a trademark of ASDG Incorporated. Page 9 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.4 Warranties ASDG Incorporated and CygnusSoft Software warrant that every effort has been made to ensure that this program will perform as documented. ASDG Incorporated and CygnusSoft Software can take no responsibility for any loss or damage incurred through the use or misuse of this program. ASDG Incorporated and CygnusSoft Software specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 1.5 A Word About Back Ups And Other Copying You are encouraged to make back up copies of CygnusEd Professional for your own exclusive use. However, making copies for others, or copies for use on multiple systems is a crime which hurts you, us and the entire Amiga community. This software package took two people two years to develop. We mention this here to point out that quality software, such as this program, takes a long long time to develop. Piracy robs the authors of compensation for their long years of hard work. Should their work be pirated, authors who remain in the business are led to produce products which require less and less time to develop so as to reduce their losses and increase their gains. In short, piracy encourages poor quality products (not the converse). Please don't copy or distribute this program to anyone. Page 10 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ================ Chapter 2 INTRODUCTION ================ 2.1 Product Overview Welcome to CygnusEd Professional! CygnusEd Professional is a high performance, full-featured text editor with enough powerful features to make it appropriate for many writing tasks usually done with word processors. However, CygnusEd Professional is also designed for programmers (most of CygnusEd Professional itself was written with CygnusEd Professional), and has many functions to make their lives easier. CygnusEd Professional was carefully designed so that almost all commands can be accessed with the mouse. Pull down menus, gadgets and scroll bars make CygnusEd Professional easy to learn and use. CygnusEd Professional was also carefully designed to be used with the keyboard. Experienced users will appreciate the keyboard shortcuts provided for almost all menu selections and gadgets. For complex editing tasks or repetitive series of commands, you can design your own editing macros, accessible from the key or keys of your choice. You can even bind existing functions to several different macro keys - allowing keyboard emulation of other popular text editors. One of the most important things about text editors is their speed. Many parts of CygnusEd Professional are written in carefully hand-coded assembly language for absolute maximum speed. Some of the results include a screen output rate of 30,000 characters per second and a search routine that scans over 100,000 characters per second (case sensitive or insensitive). Text scrolls faster than the eye can see, but this can be adjusted to suit your tastes. Page 11 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Multiple files and multiple views of files, columnar block cutting, fully customizable tab settings, user-defined defaults files and macro files to store your preferred settings and keyboard macros, visible or hidden white spaces, Hot-key operation, scroll bars, text formatting and an ARexx language interface are only a few of the many innovative features you will find in CygnusEd Professional! 2.2 Disk Contents On this disk, you should find the following files: CED The CygnusEd Professional Editing System can be found in the root directory of the distribution disk. CEDDefaults A sample defaults file containing user defined settings can be found in the S: directory. EmacsMacros A sample Macro file containing user defined macro definitions which cause CygnusEd Professional to behave similarly to the Emacs editor, can be found in the MacroFiles directory. ED A small (1.5k) utility program to run CED or pass files to CED when it is already running, can be found in the root directory of the system disk. RecoverCEDFiles A utility program to recover edits in progress should your system have crashed while files were not saved, can be found in the OtherPrograms directory. Proff An excellent public domain document formatter rivaling commercial quality products. Early versions of this manual were created using Proff (and, of course, CygnusEd Professional). Proff along with its manual can be found in the Proff directory. C_Interface_Demo A demonstration of a program which uses the ARexx style interface to control the behavior of CygnusEd Professional (without depending on the presence of ARexx) can be found in the OtherPrograms directory. Source code for this program is included as well. Page 12 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ARexx Demos Assorted ARexx programs which make use of CygnusEd Professional can be found in the ARexx directory. These programs require the presence of ARexx. BatchFiles Two examples of combining CLI batch files and the DOS Command execution facility within CygnusEd Professional can be found in the BatchFiles directory. 2.3 The Manual This manual is provided as a reference guide to CygnusEd Professional and its associated utilities. It contains information on the operation of the menu commands, keyboard commands, ARexx interface, and other information pertaining to the effective use of this software. 2.4 System Requirements CygnusEd Professional requires an Amiga with at least 512k of memory. Workbench and Kickstart 1.2 or later are also required. CygnusEd Professional is fully compatible with the Amiga 1000, 2000 and 500. 2.5 Making a Backup Before you begin using CygnusEd Professional, make a backup copy of the CygnusEd Professional release disk. Complete information on duplicating disks is given in the manuals that come with your Amiga. Use the new copy as your "work" disk. You can copy CygnusEd Professional files individually to any Workbench or other "system" disk you desire including hard disks and ram disks. We suggest copying CED to your WorkBench disk's C: or (with it's icon, to the) root directory. Then CED will be available from the CLI and Workbench. As mentioned earlier, you have the right to retain a backup of this program for PERSONAL USE ONLY. We have not put any copy-protection on the disk. This is to make it easy for you to back up your CygnusEd Professional to avoid problems in case your disk gets damaged. Remember that we are showing our faith and trust in you by not copy protecting our program. Please show your support for software publishers who don't copy-protect software by not stealing their work§. ------------------- §The publishers of CygnusEd Professional, ASDG Incorporated, would like to thank those persons who have treated us and our products with respect by not pirating our software. Long ago we stated that we would continue to bring to market quality products only as long as our trust was not abused. The product you hold in your hand is proof of our continuing faith in you, our customer. Page 13 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 14 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- =================== Chapter 3 Getting Started =================== 3.1 Starting CygnusEd Professional from the WorkBench To start CED from the WorkBench, double click on the CED icon to load the editor from disk. The editor will present an empty document ready for your commands. To edit an existing document from the WorkBench, click on its icon, then hold the SHIFT Key down while clicking on the CED icon twice. When CED is started from the WorkBench, it will automatically create an icon for any document you save, unless you override this explicitly by resetting the option ICON CREATION in the GLOBAL SETTINGS menu (see description under MENU COMMANDS). 3.2 Starting CygnusEd Professional from the CLI To start CED from the CLI, just use: 1> CED myfile.txt Use the filename you wish in place of "myfile.txt". If you omit the filename and just enter "CED", it will start up the editor with an empty document. For more advanced ways of initiating CygnusEd Professional, with multiple files or initial dormancy, see ADVANCED TOPICS. Page 15 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.3 A First Look When CygnusEd Professional appears, you will notice that a new screen (i.e., not the WorkBench screen) is created for CygnusEd Professional to use. This screen has a title bar containing the name of the file you are editing (no name, if you are creating a new file) as well as line and column number indicators. If you specified a file to load, the text that you see will comprise the initial part of the specified file. CygnusEd Professional has many commands and options, most of which are accessed via pull down menus or keyboard shortcuts. To look at these commands and options, hold down the right mouse button (the MENU button) and move the pointer to the top of the screen. You will see a list of several categories. When you move the pointer on top of a category name, a menu of command and/or options will appear. Still holding the MENU button down, you can move the pointer down the list of items in the menu and some will have submenus of more options and commands. Some of the commands and options are familiar and straightforward and some are more advanced and complex. All the commands and options listed in the menus are fully described in the MENU COMMANDS section of this manual. 3.4 Moving Around You are now in the editor proper and can begin editing. The easiest way to move around a document is with the cursor keys. These keys will move the cursor one character in the specified direction. If you look in the MOVE menu, you will see a list of cursor movement commands accessible by typing a cursor key when another key is already pressed. Commands can be selected from this list or you can use the menu as a "cheat sheet" to remind you of the keyboard commands. For example, to move to the end of your file, press CTRL and the DOWN ARROW key. To move to the beginning of the line, press SHIFT and the LEFT ARROW key. In the MOVE menu, you will see a list of variants of the arrow keys described under each of the headings of SHIFT, ALT, and CTRL. Most of these will quickly become second-nature. The SHIFT key can be found on either side of your keyboard. The ALT can be found near either AMIGA key (near the space bar). The CTRL key can be found on the left side of the keyboard near the CAPS LOCK key. Page 16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another way of moving within the file is with the "Jump to Line" command in the MOVE menu. When you select this command either through the menu or by holding an AMIGA key and pressing the letter "j" (this is an example of a keyboard shortcut), a little requester will appear and ask you to enter the line number to which you wish to go. Note that when using keyboard short cuts for menu commands, the case of the key depressed is significant. For example, pressing AMIGA and "o" will open a new file while AMIGA and "O" will include (insert) a new file. You can also move through the file using the mouse. Pressing the SELECT button (the left mouse button) will move the cursor to the character under the pointer (or as close as possible). If you hold down the SELECT button and move the mouse around, you will notice that the cursor will follow the pointer. Now, continuing to hold the button, move the pointer to the top or bottom edge of the view. The text in the window will scroll. If you experiment with this, you will notice that the further from the center of the view you hold the pointer, the faster the text will scroll! CygnusEd Professional also has an optional scroll bar that makes moving through the file intuitive and easy. If the scroll bar is not already displayed, go the the SCROLL BAR item in the VIEW SETTINGS menu and select either "scroll bar on left" or "scroll bar on right", depending on which side you want it to appear on. (Note that if your screen is wider than the standard WorkBench screen you may not be able to move the mouse over a scroll bar on the right side of the screen. This is an operating system problem which Commodore will address in future revisions of the operating system. For now, we have provided you with the option of placing the scroll bar on the left hand side of the screen which is always accessible). The scroll bar can be used with the mouse to slide through your file. Simply grab the knob (when using standard WorkBench colors, the "knob" is the small black inner box in the scroll bar) by depressing the SELECT button of your mouse over it and drag the mouse up and down. If the file is small enough to fit completely on the screen the scroll bar won't do anything. The size of the knob shows the size of the current display area compared to the whole file. The position of the knob shows you which area of the file is being displayed. You will notice that as you move the knob around, the text scrolls along, trying to keep up with you. When you release the knob the screen will show the text corresponding to the relative position of the knob within the scroll bar. The scroll bar is normally displayed, but can be switched off. The option for this is in the VIEW SETTINGS portion of the ENVIRONMENT menu. Page 17 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.5 Editing an Existing File You can specify the file you want to edit by clicking on its icon and CED's (via the WorkBench), or by specifying the file name in the command line (via the CLI). You can also specify the file to edit once you are inside CygnusEd Professional. To do this, you select OPEN... from the PROJECT menu or hold an AMIGA key down and press "o". This will display the CygnusEd Professional file requester. It is used to specify a filename for opening files, storing files, printing, etc. For a full description of the different file requester gadgets§, see USE OF THE FILE REQUESTER. For now though, just enter the directory and file names in their string gadgets. 3.6 Simple Editing 3.6.1 Adding Text Adding text in CygnusEd Professional is easy. Simply move the cursor to the location where you want to add text and start typing! The words you type are automatically inserted at the cursor location while the text following the cursor continues to move over and out of the way. Notice that as you depress a key on the keyboard your mouse cursor seems to disappear. We've provided this feature to help you concentrate on editing rather than upon constantly moving your mouse out of the way. To make the mouse visible again, simply move it. The mode you are using is called "Insert" mode. "Overstrike" mode will overwrite the text the cursor is covering. By default, CygnusEd Professional is in Insert mode. To change to Overstrike mode, you can de-select the option "Insert" in the ENVIRONMENT - File Settings Menu. ------------------- §The term "gadget" will be used extensively in this manual. Gadgets, which are an integral part of the Amiga user environment, can be thought of as buttons which can be depressed or selected with the use of the mouse. One type of gadget used in CygnusEd Professional is called the "string gadget". A string gadget is used to supply a textual answer to a request for information by CygnusEd Professional. For example, when CygnusEd Professional solicits a line number to jump to (using the JUMP TO command or AMIGA-j) you will type in the line number using a string gadget. Page 18 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You will notice that as you type and the cursor reaches the right side of the screen that the line is not broken (or "wrapped") to the next line, but instead the whole view scrolls horizontally. This way you can type in lines as long as you like (up to 1024 characters per line) and still be able to see the text on the right edge. To start a new line, just press RETURN. Another option in the FILE SETTINGS - Environment menu is "Word Wrap", which will automatically press RETURN for You when you near the edge of the view by looking at the right margin you have set (another option in the same menu). When you have this option enabled, CygnusEd Professional will let you type until a word extends beyond the right border, then that word will be moved down to the next line. 3.6.2 Deleting Text The DELETE key will remove the character under the cursor. The BACKSPACE key will remove the character to the left of the cursor. By holding the CTRL key and pressing either of these, the character that was deleted can be inserted in the current location. You can use this as an "Undo" or use it to delete a character from one location and inserting it in another. These are the delete/undelete and backspace/unbackspace character commands. To delete a word at a time, you use the same keys you use for deleting characters, but also hold down the ALT key. For example, when you press ALT and BACKSPACE, the previous word is deleted. When you later press CTRL and ALT and BACKSPACE that same word is inserted. The line delete/undelete commands are listed in the CUT/PASTE menu. They are: Delete line, Delete to End-of-Line, and Undelete Line. The command can also be accessed from the menu by pressing an AMIGA key and the letter k, y, or l, respectively. When you select Delete Line, the line the cursor is on is deleted, but is remembered, so you can later select Undelete Line to insert the line elsewhere. The Delete to End-of-Line will delete from the current cursor location to the end of the current line. The text to the left of the cursor will not be deleted. The Undelete Line will insert the text removed using this command as well. Page 19 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.7 Saving Your Work When you are editing a file, a little asterisk (*) will appear next to the line and column number indicator in the view title. This asterisk indicates that you have changed the file since the last time you saved it. If the asterisk is displayed in the title bar (i.e., if changes have been made to the file) then CygnusEd Professional will warn you if you try to exit without saving. CygnusEd Professional will also warn you if you try to do a CLEAR on a changed file or if you try to OPEN a new file in the same view as the changed file. Now that you have made some changes you are ready to save the changed file. You can either select the SAVE command or the SAVE AS... command from the PROJECT menu. The SAVE command will store your file under the same name it was opened as. If you didn't specify a file when you started or if you created a new file, you will have to specify the file name to store under. The SAVE AS... command will always ask you to specify a name. You specify the name of the file in the CygnusEd Professional file requester, which is displayed anytime the editor needs a file name. For detailed information on using the file requester, see USE OF THE FILE REQUESTER. When you have specified the file name, the file will be stored and the asterisk will disappear, meaning that no unsaved changes have been made to the file in the editor. 3.8 Exiting CygnusEd Professional When you are finished with an editing session, you can exit CygnusEd Professional by selecting QUIT from the PROJECT menu. The keyboard shortcut, AMIGA-q, will do the same thing. If you try to quit before saving the changes you have made to the file since last saving it, CygnusEd Professional will warn you of how many changes have been made since the file was last saved and ask you whether to continue quitting or abort the quit. Page 20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- =============================================== Chapter 4 INTRODUCING SOME ADVANCED EDITING FUNCTIONS =============================================== 4.1 Search And Replace 4.1.1 Searching for Text CygnusEd Professional provides an easy way of locating a particular string or character in a file. The Search function accepts a string of characters and several different search type modifiers and looks in the direction indicated for the next occurrence of the string. When you select the SEARCH FOR... function, a search requester appears. If has four boolean or "toggle" gadgets and a string gadget. The string gadget is active when the requester appears (you can tell when a string gadget is active when you can see a cursor in it). You can immediately type in the string of characters you wish to look for. When you press RETURN in the string gadget, the requester will disappear and CygnusEd Professional will move your cursor to the next occurrence of the string. If no match is found, CygnusEd Professional will report in a little requester that it could not find the string. Click on the "Resume" gadget or press the letter Y to make the requester go away. (Notice that the requester will appear as close to your mouse cursor as possible. This is just one more way in which we've tried to make CygnusEd Professional a little easier to use!) Page 21 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The REPEAT SEARCH commands will search for the next occurrence of the save string as was last indicated with the SEARCH FOR... command. There are separate REPEAT SEARCH commands for searching backwards and forwards. Several modifiers are available for the search function. These are described below. 4.1.2 UC == LC This modifier determines case sensitivity. If the gadget is highlighted (filled with a color other than the background color), then upper case is treated the same as lower case, that is, the case of the character does not matter. If the gadget is not highlighted, the search will be case sensitive, so "That" will not match with "THAT". 4.1.3 Wild Cards CygnusEd Professional provides a single wildcard for the search function. The character "*", the asterisk, will match with any single character when wildcards are turned on. When the gadget "Wild Cards" is highlighted, any asterisk entered in the search string gadget is considered a wild position. For example, to match $100, $200, $300 ... $900, you could use the wildcard string $*00. This would find all dollar signs followed by any one character followed by two zeroes. If the gadget is not highlighted, the asterisk will only match an asterisk in the file. (i.e., the asterisk is a literal and is not treated as a wild card). 4.1.4 Direction The gadget "Forwards" indicated the direction of the search. The search always begins at current cursor location. If this gadget is highlighted, the search will proceed from one character past the current cursor position towards the end of the file. If the gadget is not highlighted, the search will progress towards the beginning of the file, starting on the character just before the cursor. Page 22 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.1.5 Only Words The "Only Words" modifier will tell CygnusEd Professional to match the next occurrence of the string specified as long as it is a whole word. In effect, this means that you can search for "the" without also finding "then", "bathe", or "lather". The benefits of this for Document Processors is readily apparent. This is useful for programmers, as well, who have used a short variable name like "i" and would like to replace it with something meaningful without also replacing all of the 'i's in their 'if' and 'while' statements. 4.1.6 Shortcuts In The Search Requester Note that a specialized menu is available when the search requester is being displayed. There is a menu item for each of the toggle gadgets. By using the associated keyboard shortcuts the state of each gadget can be controlled from the keyboard without having to resort to the mouse. To exit the requester without searching, you can hit the close window gadget, the 'LEAVE' menu selection or AMIGA-L. All the normal Intuition string gadget functions are also supported, such as AMIGA-Q, for undo. For a complete list of the Intuition commands, see section 7.2, Controlling the File Requester With the Keyboard. For a complete list of CygnusEd Professional keyboard shortcuts please see the KEYBOARD COMMANDS AND SHORTCUTS section. 4.1.7 Replacing Text The Replace function is tied in closely with the Search function. You must specify the string to be sought in the first string gadget and the replacement string in the second string gadget. All the same modifiers that are available for search are also available for the replace function. Note: When searching using wildcards, the replacement does not know about the original, so if you specify wild card replacement from th*n to t*p, then the strings "than" and "then" will be replaced with "t*p". I.E., the asterisk is always literal in the replacement string gadget. Page 23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- When you press RETURN in the replacement string gadget, CygnusEd Professional will search for the next occurrence of the original string and will position the cursor there. The title bar of the view will change to read "(Y)es/(N)o/(L)ast/(G)lobal/(Q)uit?". CygnusEd Professional is waiting for you to type one of these letters to indicate: (Y)es Replace this occurrence and search for the next. (N)o Leave this occurrence alone and search for the next. (L)ast Replace this occurrence and resume normal editing. (G)lobal Replace this occurrence and all following occurrences. (Q)uit Leave this occurrence alone and resume normal editing. When you select (G)lobal replacement, the replacements will happen repetitively as fast as possible (displayed as they occur). You can stop the replacement at any time by pressing any key as CygnusEd Professional is cycling through the replacements. The other responses to the replace query perform their intuitive function. Selecting the REPEAT REPLACE command will not cause the search/replace requester to be redisplayed. Rather, CygnusEd Professional assumes the same parameters as the replace operation and will continue from the current cursor location. If the cursor is on the second string gadget (the one that contains the replacement text) and you want to go back and change the search text, you can either click on the first gadget with the mouse or you can type SHIFT-RETURN. 4.2 Cutting And Pasting With CygnusEd Professional you can cut and paste arbitrarily sized chunks (called "blocks") of text in your files. You can move blocks of text from place to place and from file (or view) to file (or view) very easily. You can also save pieces of your work as seperate files on disk or transform a block of text by using CygnusEd Professional's block commands. To do this, you must first indicate to CygnusEd Professional the region of your file you wish to work with. CygnusEd Professional has two ways of designating a block: You can define it as a linear block, where all the text between one position in the file and another defines the block; or you can define it as a columnar (or vertical) block, where a rectangular section of the file can be used. Page 24 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You use the MARK BLOCK command for the first variant and the MARK COLUMNAR BLOCK for the second. These commands define the starting point of the block. You can then move the cursor to the opposite end or corner of the area you wish to select. Notice that as you do this, the text which will be included in the block is highlighted. When the cursor is at the other end of the block, i.e.; when all of the text you wish to operate on is highlighted, you can use block commands. If you select CUT BLOCK, then the text in the area you selected will be removed from the file. The text that was removed will be stored in the "block paste buffer", however, and you can use the INSERT BLOCK command (described below) to re-insert (or "paste") it at the same location or elsewhere. If you select COPY BLOCK, then the text selected will be stored in the block paste buffer as well, but the file itself will be left undisturbed. This is useful for selecting an area of text in one part of your document that you want to copy to a new location. You would highlight the area to be copied to and select INSERT BLOCK. As you have seen, INSERT BLOCK will insert, or "paste" the contents of the "block paste buffer" to the current cursor location. The block paste buffer always contains the area selected by the last CUT BLOCK or COPY BLOCK command. If you select SAVE BLOCK, the block paste buffer can be stored to a disk file. The standard CygnusEd Professional file requester will ask you to make a file selection. There is only one "block paste buffer" in CygnusEd Professional. All views and files share this one buffer. This means that you can easily cut a block out of one file and insert the block into another file. 4.3 Using Multiple Views And Files 4.3.1 Definitions CygnusEd Professional has the ability to have as many as ten "views" on the display at one time. These views can be of the same file (co-operating views) or of different files (separate views), or a combination of both. Page 25 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A view is a portion of a file which is on screen at the moment. Each view has its own title bar, display area, and optional scroll bar to allow it to behave independently from the other views. What this means from a user's standpoint is that you can edit several areas of the same file at the same time, or compare several pieces of text in several different files, or any possible mix. This is a very useful for programmers and other users who need to view and edit several files at once, cut and paste between files or refer to different parts of the same file easily. It takes a while to get used to using it and to realize the potential, but once you start using multiple views, you will never want to go back to only having one at a time. 4.3.2 Using Multiple Views Co-operating views are two or more views which display the same file, although they may be displaying different areas of that file. When you use the SPLIT VIEW command (AMIGA-d from the SPECIAL/VIEW OPERATIONS menu), you create a co-operating view of the current file. Both views will be showing the same area of the file to start with. At this point if you type something into one of the views, what you are typing will show up concurrently in both views. Only one view is active at a time - this view is the only one with a cursor displayed in it so that you know which view you are typing in. To change active views, use the command NEXT VIEW or PREV VIEW (AMIGA-',' and AMIGA-'.' respectively) or simply click the mouse pointer in the text of the view you want to activate. Note that when you split a view, another title bar appears which shows location in the file, etc. This title bar can be moved up and down by grabbing it with the mouse (or by using the SHRINK/GROW VIEW commands in the VIEW OPERATIONS submenu in the SPECIAL menu). Moving the title bar of a view causes the bordering views to grow and shrink together in unison. A change done in one view will automatically happen in any other cooperating views at the same time (this is why they are called "cooperating" views). Similarly, if you save the file from one view, all changes made in other cooperating views of the same file are also stored, since there is actually only one copy of the file in memory. Page 26 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Splitting a view with "Split View" or AMIGA-d is different than performing Open New twice on the same file. The Split View will produce two cooperating views. Performing Open New twice on the same file will actually open the file twice. The two resulting views will NOT be cooperative. Cooperating and non-cooperating views can always be differentiated by their title bars. Cooperating views will list a view number associated with each view. Non-cooperating views will not. Besides using the mouse to size the views by sliding their title bars, there are also some menu commands which will size the views for you. When you first split a view, the twin view will take up half the height of the original. If you want to expand the current view by a single line, select the GROW VIEW command. Likewise, the SHRINK VIEW command will decrease the current view size by one line. Both the SHRINK VIEW and GROW VIEW commands work by moving the title bar of the active view up or down. To move the title bar of the view below (by menu selection rather than by the mouse), you have to first activate that view. As an example of extending the function of CygnusEd Professional using its macro facility, if you wanted to create functions for shrinking and growing the current view by moving the title bar below, you can create a macro that records a NEXT VIEW command, then a SHRINK or GROW VIEW command and then a PREV VIEW command. You can also select EXPAND VIEW. This command will explode the current view to maximum possible size. All other views above or below the current view will be reduced to a single text line (plus the title bar) each. A related command, AUTO-EXPAND VIEWS (AMIGA-[) is an environment setting found in the ENVIRONMENT - GLOBAL SETTINGS menu. When this option is enabled, CygnusEd Professional will ensure that the current view is always the maximum size. This has the same effect as hitting EXPAND VIEW every time you change views. To quit out of a view, select QUIT (AMIGA-q). This command will remove the current view and return you to the view above. If you select QUIT from the last view of a file and you have made changes to that file, CygnusEd Professional will prompt you to save the file before exiting. Also, if you quit from the last view remaining on screen, CygnusEd Professional itself will be exited (but subject to hot-start if that is enabled). 4.3.3 Using Multiple Files As mentioned earlier, you can edit several files at once with CygnusEd Professional. This can be done by specifying multiple files when you start up CygnusEd Professional, or by selecting OPEN NEW (AMIGA-?) which will split the current view in half providing a new empty view which can be bound to a file with a subsequent OPEN. The new file will be loaded in, without disturbing the original view of the first file. Page 27 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You now have two files on the display. You can then split these views further if you wish. You can size or move the views the same way as you would co-operating views (see preceding chapter for information on using multiple views). You can bounce back and forth between the different files (and views) as often as you wish. You can create co-operating views for either or both files, or you can continue to load additional files into CygnusEd Professional. This makes it easy to do cross-comparison of different files, since you can see both files at the same time. You can even use the block operations to move information from one file to another via the block paste buffer (see CUTTING And PASTING earlier in this manual). If you want CygnusEd Professional to appear with several files in it when you first start up, you can specify all of the file names you want loaded after the program name on the command line. If CygnusEd Professional is already loaded but dormant, you can use the CygnusEd Activator, "ED", to cause CygnusEd Professional to load several files at once as well (see the section on the CygnusEd Activator ED). Example: CED file1 file2 file3 If you are running CygnusEd Professional from the WorkBench you can use EXTENDED SELECT to select multiple files and then double click on the last one or on CygnusEd Professional. Extended selection is a feature of the WorkBench which allows you to have more than one icon highlighted at once. Click on the first icon, then hold down the shift key while clicking on the icons of the other files to be loaded. Then, while still holding down the shift key, double click on either CygnusEd Professional or an icon whose default tool is CygnusEd Professional. CygnusEd Professional will appear and will load in all of the selected files. 4.4 Printing Your File You will probably want to print out your file to a printer at some time. As CygnusEd Professional does not insert special formatting control codes, you can use the CLI "Type" or "Copy" commands to send a file to the printer (often the PRT: device). However, it is often more convenient to use the CygnusEd Professional print function. An advantage of using the CygnusEd Professional print function is that it multitasks (you can resume using the editor as soon as you have started a print job, without waiting for the print job to end). Another is that you can get the CygnusEd Professional print function to replace all tabs with the appropriate number of spaces as it prints (very useful if you are using a non-standard tab size which your printer won't understand). Page 28 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To print the entire active file, use the PRINT FILE option in the PROJECT menu. If you want to print a portion of your file, you can move it to the block paste buffer using the CUT BLOCK or COPY BLOCK functions described in the CUTTING And PASTING section of this manual. Then use the PRINT BLOCK function to print the block. When you select a print function, CygnusEd Professional will ask you what file or device you wish to print it to. Normally, you will print to the device PRT:, which under AmigaDOS is the printer you have specified in your Preferences. This is the default. You can also send the printout to a file on the disk, or to a different device, such as the serial port (SER:). The CygnusEd Professional file requester will ask for the output name. If you are specifying a device, you should enter the device name in the file name line, rather than the directory name line. When you specify where the output will go, a new print requester will appear. The print options requester will give you the option of converting existing tabs to spaces (default) or existing spaces to tabs. Converting tabs to spaces has the effect of ensuring that no matter what your tab settings are in CygnusEd Professional as compared to the printer, your text will look the same on the printer as on the screen. CygnusEd Professional replaces all tabs in your file with the correct number of spaces to the next tab stop as it prints. Converting spaces to tabs is useful for changing the tab size of a document. For example, if you have a document that had irregular tab stops and you want to convert it to tab size 8 without changing the look of the existing text you would: 1. Print the file using tabs to spaces, outputting to a disk file, 2. Load the disk file you just created, 3. Change the tab settings to regular intervals of eight, and 4. Print the file using spaces to tabs. The print options requester also has a gadget asking for the number of characters to indent the file. The number entered here is effectively the "left margin" of the printout. Page 29 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before starting the print job CygnusEd Professional makes a copy of the file or block to be printed. Therefore, as soon as the print job has started you can continue using the editor including the "block paste buffer" or quit out of the file being printed without interfering with the printout. Page 30 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ================= Chapter 5 MENU COMMANDS ================= 5.1 Project Menu 5.1.1 About The ABOUT selection will display the Copyright notice for CygnusEd Professional. CygnusEd Professional is copyrighted 1987, 1988 by CygnusSoft Software and is published by ASDG Incorporated. 5.1.2 Clear The CLEAR (AMIGA-/) command will clear the current file from memory. If you made any changes to the file since last saving it, you will be asked to confirm clearing the file. This command will clear all views of the active file, but will not close down any of the views. The file name will also be cleared. 5.1.3 Open New The OPEN NEW (AMIGA-?) command will create a view with an empty file. If the file you are editing when you call this command has no other views, then an additional view will be created for you. If you are editing a file of which there is one or more other views, then the current view will contain the new empty file. Page 31 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This method ensures that a minimum number of extra views are created, while still ensuring that the original file is available to the operator. 5.1.4 Open The OPEN (AMIGA-o) command allows you to load a file into the current view. If you have no other views of the file you are editing when you call this command, then this action will attempt to remove the previous file from memory before loading the new file. If you have made changes that haven't been saved, you will be asked to confirm the action. If there are several views on the same original file, then when you call this command, the new file will only go into the active view, the old file will remain in the other view(s). Therefore, if you want to edit two files at once, you should use the command SPLIT VIEW before you call OPEN, to make sure that the new file gets a window to itself or use the OPEN NEW command to automatically create the new view. 5.1.5 Include File The INCLUDE FILE command (AMIGA-O) will insert a file into the active file at the current cursor location. You specify the file you want to include using the CygnusEd Professional file requester. 5.1.6 Save Block The SAVE BLOCK command (AMIGA-n) will store the current block paste buffer under the file name you specify using the file requester. If no block has been cut or copied during your session, then CygnusEd Professional will inform you that it has nothing to save. For information on the block paste buffer, see the commands COPY BLOCK and CUT BLOCK in the CUT/PASTE section. 5.1.7 Save The SAVE (AMIGA-w) command will store the current file to the disk. With this command (as compared to the SAVE AS command), CygnusEd Professional will assume you want to save the file under its original name. If you want to save it under a different name, then use the SAVE AS command described below. If no name has been set for the current file, then CygnusEd Professional will automatically do a SAVE AS. Page 32 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.1.8 Save As This command (AMIGA-W) is very similar to the SAVE command. It allows the operator to store the current file to the disk and provide a name for it. The file requester will always appear with this command, whereas the SAVE command will assume the original name. If the file specified already exists, CygnusEd Professional will warn you that the file already exists and will confirm that you really do want to overwrite the file. 5.1.9 Save all changes This function is useful if you are working on several different files. When you select this function CygnusEd Professional does a SAVE on all files that have been changed since they were last saved (all files that have an asterisk in the title bar). 5.1.10 Change Current Directory This command is used in conjunction with the DOS/ARexx command interface. This command allows you to enter a new directory from which subsequent DOS commands will be based. Please see the more detailed description of the use of this command in the DOS/ARexx interface chapter. 5.1.11 Print Block The PRINT BLOCK command (AMIGA-p) allows the user to print the current block paste buffer to a file or to the printer device (default). The user specifies where he wants the printout to go to via the CygnusEd Professional file requester. When the output filename (or device name) has been designated, the operator is offered additional print options (as discussed in the section on PRINTING YOUR FILE). The PRINT BLOCK command is multitasking so the operator is free to continue editing while the block is being printed. Page 33 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.1.12 Print File The PRINT FILE command (AMIGA-P) works the same way as the PRINT BLOCK command, except it prints the entire active file instead of the current block paste buffer. See the PRINT BLOCK description or the PRINTING YOUR FILE section for further information. 5.1.13 Quit The QUIT command (AMIGA-q) will quit the current view. If the current view is the last remaining view of a file with changes, then CygnusEd Professional will ask for confirmation of the Quit. If the current file is the last view in CygnusEd Professional, then the program will exit (subject to HOT START options). If the setting HOT START ENABLED (in the ENVIRONMENT - GLOBAL SETTINGS menu) is set, then CygnusEd Professional will become dormant, or "sleep", until awakened with a Hot Key or by the ED program. See the ADVANCED TOPICS SECTION on HOT KEYS AND DORMANCY for more information. If HOT START is not enabled, then CygnusEd Professional will exit completely. 5.1.14 Save And Quit This command (AMIGA-Q) is a quick way of selecting the SAVE command and then the QUIT command. See the SAVE and QUIT commands for a description of their respective functions. 5.1.15 Quit And Die The QUIT And DIE command performs the same function as the QUIT command except that it ignores the HOT START ENABLED setting and always exits completely. In other words, if you select this command, CygnusEd Professional will not enter a dormant state, rather, it will terminate completely. Page 34 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2 Global Parameters Menu (Under Environment) 5.2.1 Screen Height The SCREEN HEIGHT setting allows you to set your preferred screen height. There are several pre-defined settings ranging from 200 pixels to 236 pixels and a user-settable option which will allow CygnusEd Professional to use high-resolution monitor effectively. The bottom subitem is an interlace toggle. With this option enabled, there is an effective doubling of vertical screen information (which means the CygnusEd Professional screen will consume twice as much memory when interlaced than when not. And...the characters will visually be half as large). If the screen height and screen width are small enough to fit on the WorkBench screen and FORCE CUSTOM SCREEN is not set then CygnusEd Professional will open up on the WorkBench screen. Although this is useful sometimes, it does make CygnusEd Professional run noticeably slower. 5.2.2 Screen Width The SCREEN WIDTH settings allow you to set your preferred screen width. You can select from the predefined settings of 640 to 704 pixels, or set your own custom selection with the bottom item. If the screen height and screen width are small enough to fit on the WorkBench screen and FORCE CUSTOM SCREEN is not set, then CygnusEd Professional will open up on the WorkBench screen. Running on the WorkBench screen will slow the performance of CygnusEd Professional, however. 5.2.3 Force Custom Screen The option FORCE CUSTOM SCREEN will force CygnusEd Professional to create its own "Screen" for display at all times. With this option disabled, CygnusEd Professional will appear as a window on the WorkBench screen whenever the screen height and width settings will allow it to fit. Since screen display time is noticeably faster if CygnusEd Professional is on its own screen, this option is recommended. 5.2.4 Macros/Key Definitions The functions under this item let the user define macros and assign them to almost any key on the keyboard. The macros can store a sequence of keystrokes and menu selections for easy playback. This capability can be used to remap the keyboard to emulate another text editor (see the MicroEmacs emulation file on the disk), create keyboard shortcuts for menu items that lack them or store long repetitive sequences of operations. For a full description of how to use the macro key commands effectively, see USING MACROS EFFECTIVELY. Page 35 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.5 Priority Because the Amiga is a multitasking operating system, the different tasks running at any given time are assigned "priority" levels. These priority levels determine who gets the lion's share of the available computer time. A high priority task will take all the time it needs and will only allow lower priority tasks to use time that it wouldn't use itself. CygnusEd Professional provides the ability to change its own priority level for those situations where this might be appropriate. The option INHERIT means that CygnusEd Professional will not modify its own priority level, but will leave it the way it started when it came up from the CLI or the WorkBench. The SET PRIORITY command lets you set the priority to a specified number from -9 to 9. The PRIORITY n (where n varies) command is used if the priority (given by "n") is already correct but INHERIT is selected. It causes CygnusEd Professional to start using the priority (given by "n") instead of using the inherited priority, but it doesn't bring up a requester asking you to type in the priority. 5.2.6 Autosave The AUTOSAVE function is a way of helping to protect yourself against power surges, system crashes, and other potential problems. When autosave is enabled, CygnusEd Professional will automatically prompt you to save your work every "n" minutes since your least recent unsaved change. You can set the amount of time you wish between save prompts with the SET TIMER command. The range of acceptable values is from 5 to 99 minutes. Notice that as you change the time period, the "Every N Min" menu item will be changed to reflect the new value of "N". This option can be turned off entirely by deselecting the EVERY n MIN menu item. Page 36 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.7 Set Icon Tool Name When CygnusEd Professional creates an icon for use with a file (see ICON CREATION below), the icon is stored with a parameter called the "Default Tool". The default tool is the program that is run when the icon is double clicked upon in the WorkBench. If you store CygnusEd Professional in your C: directory under the name "ced" then you should set this to C:CED. If you store CygnusEd Professional in the root directory of your disk then this should be set to :CED, or to DISKNAME:CED. If you want ED to be run when you click on this file (so that ED will run CED if CED is not running and pass CED the file name if CED is running) then you should set this to C:ED. If you desire some other program to be the default tool for a file then you specify its name with this command, as well. For example, if you wish to create a text file which was visible from the WorkBench and could be viewed when double clicked, you might specify one of the public domain text viewers as the file's default tool. 5.2.8 Change Colors The CHANGE COLORS (AMIGA-$) function sets the color arrangement used when editing. The color palette is inherited from the WorkBench screen. By default, CygnusEd Professional will use the same color arrangement as the WorkBench. The color selection array that CygnusEd Professional uses is an array of all twenty-four possible arrangements of the WorkBench colors. Each time this function is selected the color set will move another step through the array. This function is disabled when CygnusEd Professional is on the WorkBench screen. 5.2.9 Do Safe Saves When this option is enabled, CygnusEd Professional will use a safer, but slightly slower method of saving files to the disk. First, it stores the file in the destination directory under a temporary filename (called cygnusedtempa.###). When that is complete, it deletes the old version of the destination file and then renames the temporary file to the new destination name. This makes the saving method slightly longer and certainly uses more disk space, albeit temporarily, since two copies of the file will exist on the disk for a brief time. Page 37 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The advantage of using this option is that if a serious problem occurs during storage, such as a power outage, the destination file is not corrupted - there is always a copy of either the new or old file. The safe saving method is not used when the destination file does not already exist. In this case there is no advantage to storing, then renaming, so a straight store to destination is used. If the disk being saved to is so full that their is no room for two copies of the file the editor will tell you that there was a problem and will ask you if you want to save directly over top of the old file. If you routinely work with nearly full disks then this option will slow things down considerably. If your disks are usually this full you should probably turn this option off. 5.2.10 Icon Creation The ICON CREATION option specifies whether an icon is saved whenever you save a file. If you are using CygnusEd Professional from the WorkBench and want to be able to double click on files from the WorkBench to load them into the editor then you should set this option on. If you use the CLI then you should turn this option off to avoid wasting any disk space on icons. The default tool stored in the icon is settable with the SET ICON TOOL NAME function described above. 5.2.11 HOT Start HOT Starting, if enabled, will keep a dormant copy of CygnusEd Professional in memory each time you quit from the last CygnusEd Professional view. Rather than exiting completely, CygnusEd Professional will reduce its memory requirements and not consume any computing power of your machine. At any time should you depress RIGHT-SHIFT/RIGHT-ALT/RETURN (right shift with the right alt key and the return key) together, any dormant copy of CygnusEd Professional will spring to life instantaneously. In this way, CygnusEd Professional can be "exited" and entered with lightning quickness improving your productivity by reducing your edit-compile or edit-format time. Should you wish to force CygnusEd Professional to exit completely, depress the CTRL key in addition to the other keys mentioned above. This will purge all resources consumed by CygnusEd Professional and, of course, disable the HOT Start feature. Page 38 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- When CygnusEd Professional is dormant it can also be revived from the CLI of the WorkBench. The ED program is used to do this. From the CLI you type ED followed by the names of any files you wish to load into CygnusEd Professional. Ed instantly passes the file names to CygnusEd Professional if CygnusEd Professional is in memory and runs it if it is not. The same thing can be done from the WorkBench. Either click on the ED icon or on the icon of a file whose default tool name is ED and it will find CygnusEd Professional and awaken it. For more information see ED - THE CygnusEd Professional ACTIVATOR. Another advantage of using the dormancy feature of ED, besides fast response, is it can actually save you memory. If you normally keep a copy of your editor in a ram disk and then run it, you actually have two copies in memory, one in the ram disk and one loaded in to run. If you use the dormancy feature of CygnusEd Professional then there is no reason to keep a copy in the ram disk since you can just leave it resident. Please see ADVANCED TOPICS for a detailed description of HOT keys and dormancy. 5.2.12 Auto-Expand Views The views of the files in CygnusEd Professional can be expanded or contracted by sliding the title bars up and down with the mouse or with the SHRINK VIEW and GROW VIEW commands. For the user who frequently edits in more than one view at a time, it is often useful to set AUTO-EXPAND VIEWS on. When this option is set (AMIGA-[), the current view is made as large as possible, by moving all other views out of the way to their smallest sizes. Then, whenever the user activates a different view, the new view will automatically be expanded to maximum size. When this option is not set, CygnusEd Professional will not change the size of the views unless specifically instructed to do so. 5.2.13 Keypad = Movement The KEYPAD movement option (AMIGA-S) makes the numeric keypad perform movement functions instead of entering numbers. When this option is enabled, the keypad layout is: ------------------------------------------------ | beg of line | up 1 line | top of page | |---------------|---------------|----------------| | left 1 char | center cursor | right 1 char | |---------------|---------------|----------------| | end of line | down 1 line | bottom of page | |-------------------------------|----------------| | toggle insert mode | delete char | ------------------------------------------------ instead of ----------------- | 7 | 8 | 9 | |-----|-----|-----| | 4 | 5 | 6 | |-----|-----|-----| | 1 | 2 | 3 | |-----------|-----| | 0 | . | ----------------- Page 39 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is very similar to the keypad usage on an IBM PC. In fact, this is the way the keypad is labeled on the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000. Note: While the SHIFT key is held down it toggles the status of KEYPAD MOVEMENT. If keypad movement is not set, then the keypad can be used for movement while the SHIFT key is held down. If keypad movement is set, then the keypad can be used for entering numbers while you hold down the SHIFT key. 5.2.14 Load And Save Environment These commands allow the user to store all the settings in the ENVIRONMENT menus GLOBAL PARAMETERS, FILE PARAMETERS, and VIEW PARAMETERS. These are considered the "Environment" settings. With the SAVE and LOAD ENVIRONMENT commands the user can store these settings for automatic recall next time he uses the editor. STORING PREFERRED SETTINGS describes this feature in full. 5.3 File Settings (Under Environment) 5.3.1 Tab Size The TAB SIZE menu lists tab size settings from 1 to 10 column separations. When the user changes this setting, all views of the current file will be updated to display the file using the new tab size. Note that tabs can be further customized with the CUSTOMIZE TABS option. Page 40 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.2 Customize Tabs The CUSTOMIZE TABS function (AMIGA-t) overrides the TAB SIZE setting. With it, you can set tabs anywhere on the line you wish, not just at regular intervals as TAB SIZE does. When you select CUSTOMIZE TABS, a line appears at the top of the screen containing dashes (-'s) and T's. The T's are the tab stops. You can create a tab stop by clicking the mouse over the dash where you want the stop. You can clear a tab by clicking on a T. All views of the file will be updated as the tabs are changed. To finish setting the tabs, press any keyboard key or the right mouse button. 5.3.3 Set Right Border This command (AMIGA-^) will set the right border of the document. The right border is used by the word wrap and formatting functions. When invoked, the SET RIGHT BORDER command will display a vertical line where the current right border is at and another vertical line under the pointer. By moving the pointer back and forth, the user can see the column number change and can click the mouse when he is over the column where he wants the right border to be set. If you want to set the right border to a value larger than you can move the mouse to (more than about eight columns) simply move the mouse over as far as possible and click. A requester will come up asking you if you want to specify a larger number. You can then type in the column number you would like the right border to be set to. 5.3.4 Set Scroll Jump CygnusEd Professional is capable of scrolling text at incredible speeds due to its custom text output routines and custom scrolling routines. Some people find these incredible speeds too fast to be useful and prefer that CygnusEd Professional scroll more smoothly. We aim to please both the speed freaks and those who prefer slow and smooth scrolling by allowing you to specify how much CygnusEd Professional will move the screen in each scroll motion. The numbers in the SET SCROLL JUMP menu refer to how many pixels each line will move in each screen update. Smaller numbers mean it scrolls slower and smoother, larger numbers mean it scrolls faster. Page 41 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- When CygnusEd Professional needs to scroll farther than one line, (if the user types SHIFT and the DOWN ARROW KEY for instance) the actual number of pixels moved in each jump is increased, but the basic idea remains the same. Large numbers mean faster scrolling, small numbers mean slower but smoother scrolling. If CygnusEd Professional has to scroll even further, it increases the jump amount even more and if it has to move more than about fifty lines, it doesn't bother scrolling. It redraws the screen instead. 5.3.5 Layout LAYOUT mode (AMIGA-5) allows the user to position the cursor anywhere on the line, regardless of where the end-of-line marker is. The original ED text editor that was provided with the Amiga used this mode. Normally, with this option not set, the cursor is limited to staying where the text is, i.e., it cannot go beyond the end-of-line. This is what most people prefer. The LAYOUT option is helpful for drawing diagrams or pictures on the screen or designing tables with the editor because it lets you move to all locations unhindered. 5.3.6 Word Wrap This option (AMIGA-6) lets you enter text into the editor without having to press RETURN at the end of each line. With this option on, CygnusEd Professional will detect when the RIGHT BORDER is reached and will force the last word, which would have extended beyond the right margin, to go to the next line (along with your cursor). This is a very useful option for all textual documents (letters, memos, documentation, etc.). To force a group of words to be on the same line, you can use ALT-SPACE instead of SPACE to separate the words. The ALT-SPACE is not considered a white space character. CygnusEd Professional treats words separated by ALT-SPACE as being one big word. ALT-SPACE is displayed like a regular space (except that it doesn't become visible if you select VISIBLE SPACES) and most printers will print it as a space. (The right border can be set with the SET RIGHT BORDER command described above.) Page 42 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.7 Insert Mode This option (AMIGA-7) will cause any text you type to be inserted at the current cursor location, moving all other text on the line to the right. With the option disabled, the user is in OVERSTRIKE mode. Here, text that is typed will overwrite whatever other text was underneath the cursor. CygnusEd Professional defaults to having insert mode turned on. 5.3.8 Tabs = Spaces The TABS = SPACES option (AMIGA-0) causes the TAB key to be interpreted as "insert spaces from here to the next tab stop". In essence, it causes all subsequent TAB key presses to insert spaces instead of tabs. It is important to note that this option does not convert existing tabs to spaces. To perform that function, see the PRINT BLOCK and PRINT FILE command description. 5.4 View Parameters 5.4.1 Status Line The status line is a line of information that overwrites the title bar of the view. With the status line off, the title bar will display the filename and the current line and column inthe file. With the status line on, the title bar will display either a "Changes" status line or a "Pages" status line. The "Changes" status line contains the number of lines in the file, number of changes made to the file since last save, current size in bytes and current line and column in the file. The "Pages" status line shows the number of pages in the file, the current page number, the current line on the page, and the current line and column in the file. Whenever changes have been made to the file, and asterisk will appear next to the line number designation. This is visible in all status line modes. The status line feature can be toggled on and off with AMIGA-9. Page 43 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.2 White Spaces CygnusEd Professional provides options to display some white-space characters as special symbols. This can often aid you when programming or crating text documents. A TAB character, when visible, look like a thin vertical bar. A space character looks like a small bow tie. Both are small and dim enough that they can be left visible without being too distracting. An EOL (End-Of-Line) character looks like a right triangle. It is much larger and darker than the displayable TAB or space characters. The ESC CODES visible will allow the user to see the actual escape sequence as individual characters. With this option disabled, the escape sequence gets swallowed up by the following character, which is reversed to show that it is hiding an escape sequence. This way, special escape codes can be buried in a document without getting in the way of the text or character-count sensitive functions (like word wrap or paragraph formatting). An ALT-SPACE character (which is always displayed as a space, regardless of the settings of SPACES VISIBLE) is not considered a white space by CygnusEd Professional. You can use it to cause a set of words to be treated by the editor as a single word (i.e., for word wrap, format, etc.). TAB visibility can be toggled by AMIGA-&. SPACE visibility can be toggled by AMIGA-*. EOL visibility is toggled by AMIGA-( and ESCAPE visibility is toggled by AMIGA-). 5.4.3 Scroll Bar The SCROLL BAR options let you set whether a scroll bar is displayed and if it is displayed, whether it appears on the left or the right side of the screen. The scroll bar is updated to indicate your position in the file as well as the size of the view as compared to the size of the file (in lines). The scroll bar can be used for real-time scrolling with the mouse pointer by grabbing the scroll bar's knob (by depressing and holding the left mouse button while positioned over the knob) and moving the mouse forward or backward. A forward motion of the mouse will move up towards the beginning of the file. A backward motion of the mouse will move down towards the end of the file. If you wish to set the screen width to wider than 640 pixels, you will probably want to position the scroll bar on the left side of the screen instead of the right. This is because the present revisions of the Amiga operating system will restrict mouse movement to a 640 pixel wide area irrespective of the actual width of the screen. Since this would prevent you from accessing the scroll bar (when on the right side of the screen) CygnusEd Professional can display the scroll bar on the left side (where it is always accessible). Page 44 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.4 Set Scroll Borders CygnusEd Professional attempts to keep the cursor within a certain scroll area. This ensures that you can always see a few lines in all directions. The scroll area can be defined by this command (AMIGA-z). When invoked, this command will display a rectangular box which is the current scroll area. A set of cross hairs will follow the pointer for you to set the upper left corner of the new scroll area. When the first corner is established. The scroll area also defines where on the screen the turbo-scrolling feature will be effective. Depressing the left mouse button inside the scroll area will simply move the cursor to the mouse position. Depressing the left mouse button outside the scroll area will move the cursor to the selected position as well as force a slight scrolling to take place. 5.5 Special Menu 5.5.1 View Operations CygnusEd Professional provides the ability to edit multiple views and multiple files on the screen at one. Each "view" of a file is a horizontal section of the CygnusEd Professional screen. For further information on the use of multiple views and editing multiple files, see Section 10 - ADVANCED TOPICS. To move between different views, you can use the PREV (AMIGA-',') and NEXT VIEW (AMIGA-'.') commands. Theses commands will activate the view above or below the currently active view, respectively. The cursor goes to the position it was in when the view was last active. To create an additional view of the same file, use the SPLIT VIEW command (AMIGA-d). This command creates another view of the same file by splitting the current view in half. The lower view becomes active. Page 45 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The EXPAND VIEW (AMIGA-]) command will make the current view as large as possible. It moves all views above or below the current view as far away as possible, reducing their size to the minimum. The current view then has maximum work area. This can also be done by grabbing the title bars of the views above and below and dragging them away, but it is often more convenient to have a menu option, complete with keyboard shortcut, to do this for you. The commands GROW and SHRINK VIEW will expand or contract the current view one line at a time. For these commands to be useful they really need keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately we ran out of keys. However you can create your own keyboard shortcuts, using the macro commands. Simply assign a macro to your favorite unused keys (maybe F8 and F9) and then record the menu selections in the macro. Save the macro file in S:cedmacros and you'll always have keyboard shortcuts for these menu items. See Section 9 - USING MACROS EFFECTIVELY for more information. As has been mentioned before, the mouse can also be used to size a view by dragging title bars around to create the desired screen format. 5.5.2 Format The FORMAT commands will format a paragraph of text so that no words exceed the right margin. To use, place the cursor on the first line of the paragraph and then select one of the FORMAT commands. The variant FORMAT WITH FILL (AMIGA-f) will automatically fill the line with spaces between words to pad the line out to exactly the right border. The WITHOUT FILL (AMIGA-F) variant leaves the paragraph with a ragged right edge. The formatting continues until a blank line or a line that is indented is found. To force a group of words to be on the same line, you can use ALT-SPACE instead of just SPACE to separate the words. The ALT-SPACE is not considered a white-space character by CygnusEd Professional, but it displayed as a space would be. CygnusEd Professional considers the ALT-SPACE to be a continuation of the previous word. For information on setting the right border, see the SET RIGHT BORDER command description described above. Page 46 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.5.3 DOS/ARexx Interface This menu permits external programs to control or be controlled by CygnusEd Professional. The ARexx commands are for use by users who have the ARexx library available on their system. ARexx is not sold with CygnusEd Professional but can be purchased separately from William Hawes (P.O. Box 308, Maynard, Ma. 01754 (608) 568-8695). The ARexx commands provide a method of controlling CygnusEd Professional from an external program or controlling an external program from CygnusEd Professional. ARexx programs can be used to perform many extended functions designed by the operator such as a next/prev error command to create an integrated programming/development environment. The DOS/ARexx interface in CygnusEd Professional allows you to customize CygnusEd Professional as much as you want. If there is a particular feature that you'd like to perform which is not presently a built in part of CygnusEd Professional, you can probably write the function yourself using the tools of your choice and hook it in to CygnusEd Professional using CygnusEd Professional's strong inter-process communications capabilities. In addition to being able to send commands to ARexx, the DOS/ARexx interface also lets you execute DOS commands. If the command you install in a menu entry is unknown to ARexx, or if you don't have ARexx then CygnusEd Professional will try to execute a DOS command of the same name. However, it is extremely important to note that if CygnusEd Professional has disconnected itself from the invoking CLI you will not be able to use this feature. As an example of the ways in which inter-process communication can be of assistance to you, suppose there existed a spelling checker which had an ARexx interface. Then it would be possible to link the spelling checker to CygnusEd Professional to give you the power of the two programs combined! An example for the programmer is a program that could be written which has an ARexx interface and code which would parse the diagnostic output of you language compiler. Then, CygnusEd Professional could launch your compiler and then interpret the diagnostics of the compilation all from within CygnusEd Professional. For a full description of the CygnusEd Professional/ARexx interface and the DOS command interface, see THE DOS/ARexx INTERFACE. Page 47 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.5.4 Enter ASCII The ENTER ASCII command (AMIGA-"-") will allow you to enter a numeric value from 0 to 255 representing a single character to be inserted at the current cursor position. The number entered is the ASCII code for the character entered, provided in decimal notation. With this command, any value for any byte can be entered into the file, even if it is not directly accessible by the keyboard. When you select ENTER ASCII a requester will appear asking for the ASCII value of the character to be inserted. This requester will continue to appear and characters will continue to be inserted until you cancel the requester by either pressing return when the string gadget is empty, clicking on the close gadget, or selecting leave from the menu. Some sample ascii values are 65 for 'A' and 97 for 'a'. 5.5.5 Center Cursor This command (AMIGA-'=') will scroll the text in the current view to cause the current line to be displayed in the center of the view. It does not change the cursor position within the file. 5.5.6 Center Line The CENTER LINE command (AMIGA-\) will attempt to center the current line between column 0 and the right margin. It does this by stripping off all spaces and tabs at the beginning and ending of the line and inserting enough spaces to center the line horizontally. If the line is too long to be centered it will do nothing. For information setting the right border, see the SET RIGHT BORDER command description described above. 5.5.7 Repeat Key/Menu The REPEAT KEY/MENU command (AMIGA-") allows you to repeat a keystroke or menu selection a specified number of times. When selected, this command will display a requester asking for the number of times to repeat the command. After specifying the number of repititions, type the key or make the menu selection to be repeated. The effect of the repetition will be seen on the screen as it occurs. Should you wish to stop the repetition prematurely, depress any key on the keyboard. The key you depress will not be inserted into the file. Page 48 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to repeat a whole string of keypresses and menu selections, define a macro containing all the keypresses and menu selections and repeat that macro. 5.5.8 Find Matching Bracket This command helps you to find the parentheses ")", bracket "]", or brace "}" that balances the one under the cursor. If it is an opening parenthesis, bracket or brace, then CygnusEd Professional will scan forward through the file, skipping over nested sets of the same kind until it encounters the corresponding closing parentheses, bracket, or brace. When executed from a closing parenthesis, bracket or brace, CygnusEd Professional will scan backwards for the corresponding opening punctuation. To use this command, place the cursor over the parenthesis, bracket, or brace you wish to match, then call the command (by menu selection or by AMIGA-h). If the matching parenthesis is found, then the cursor will move to the corresponding spot for a second before returning to its original location. If the matching parenthetic is not found, CygnusEd Professional will report the failure. This command is very useful for programmers, as it helps to confirm that program section delimiters are properly matched. 5.5.9 Mark Location N And Jump to Mark N CygnusEd Professional can use special "bookmarks" to allow the user to pop from place to place in the file. You may define up to three bookmarks per file. To set a bookmark, call the command MARK LOCATION n, where n is the number of the bookmark. The current cursor position within the file will be remembered as bookmark n. Then to jump back to that location in the file later on, select the command, JUMP TO MARK n. Note that the keyboard shortcuts for setting marks one through three are AMIGA-SHIFT one through three (AMIGA-!, AMIGA-@, and AMIGA-#). The keyboard shortcuts for jumping to a mark are, simply, AMIGA one through three (AMIGA-1, AMIGA-2 and AMIGA-3). Using bookmarks you can specify up to three "areas of interest" within a file and instantly jump between them. This is very helpful when moving sections of text from place to place in a large document. Page 49 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- In addition to the three standard bookmarks, CygnusEd Professional maintains a transient "auto-mark". The auto-mark is an additional bookmark which is defined as the last position the cursor was in before CygnusEd Professional had to redraw an entire screen. If you were positioned in the middle of a large file and jumped to the beginning or end of the file (CTRL UP ARROW or CTRL DOWN ARROW), the auto-mark would be defined as the character position you were in before making the long distance jump. Selecting JUMP TO AUTO-MARK (AMIGA-4) will return you to where you were before you skipped to the beginning or end of the file. 5.6 Cut/Paste Menu 5.6.1 Block Commands The BLOCK COMMANDS are used for moving arbitrary size pieces of text within the file. They can cut pieces out, paste pieces in, duplicate pieces, and can be used to move data from one file to another. To define a block, you must first mark an end of the block by using the MARK BLOCK command (AMIGA-b). Then move the cursor to the other end of the block. Note that the area between the cursor and the block mark is highlighted. When you are at the other end of the block, you can select COPY BLOCK (AMIGA-c), which will copy the area selected to CygnusEd Professional's paste buffer. The block will then be available for INSERTing (AMIGA-i), SAVing (AMIGA-n) or PRINTing (AMIGA-p). You can also use CUT BLOCK (AMIGA-x) which is the same as COPY BLOCK, except that it will delete the selected area from the file as well. ROT BLOCK will ROTate a section of text thirteen characters over. This is a very common method of encoding text on electronic networks such as Usenet. It rotates all alphabetic characters thirteen positions on a wheel of the alphabetic characters. To encode a section of text, MARK (AMIGA-b) the start of the text, move to the end of the text, and select ROT BLOCK. The text within the selected range will be rotated. To decode ROT'ed text, perform the same operation. STRIP CR BLOCK is used in the same way as ROT BLOCK. Its function is to remove carriage returns from a section of text. On the Amiga, a new line is marked with a linefeed (ASCII value 10). Some files brought to the Amiga from other machines contain a carriage return (ASCII value 13) and linefeed at the end of every line. These carriage returns (displayed in CygnusEd Professional as a reversed capital M) can be removed from a block of text with the STRIP CR BLOCK command. Page 50 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The CHANGE CASE BLOCK command is used the same way as ROT BLOCK. It changes the case (UPPER or lower) of every alphabetic character in the designated block of text. MARK COLUMNAR BLOCK is a different way of defining a block. Normally, a block is defined as all text on all lines between the beginning of the block and the end of the block. With MARK COLUMNAR BLOCK, you can define a block to be any rectangular area on the screen. This is very useful for working with multiple columns, or moving tables around on the screen. It is most often used in conjunction with the LAYOUT option (see the LAYOUT command description above). For more information on the columnar block see section 10.3, Using the Columnar Block Effectively. 5.6.2 Delete Word And Undelete Word CygnusEd Professional can delete and undelete words to the left or right of the cursor. To delete a word to the left of the cursor you would depress ALT-BACKSPACE. Notice that simply BACKSPACE would delete the character to the left of the cursor. Applying the ALT qualifier to the BACKSPACE key changes its meaning from "delete previous character" to "delete previous word". Similarly, to delete the word to the right of the cursor, depress ALT-DEL. Recall that simply DEL will delete the character to the right of the cursor. Again, the ALT qualifier to DEL changes its meaning from character to word operation. A word deleted with ALT-BACKSPACE or ALT-DEL can be reinserted (un-deleted) by using CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE or CTRL-ALT-DEL (respectively). CygnusEd Professional maintains a seperate undelete buffer for deleting to the left and right. So, to reinsert a word deleted with ALT-DEL, you'll need to use CTRL-ALT-DEL as CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE will reinsert an entirely different word. 5.6.3 Line Commands The line commands DELETE LINE (AMIGA-k), DELETE TO EOL (AMIGA-y), and UNDELETE LINE (AMIGA-l) provide a means of cutting and inserting a single line of text at a time (DELETE TO EOL stands for "Delete to the End-Of-Line"). Page 51 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Both DELETE LINE and DELETE TO EOL put the deleted text in the line buffer. This buffer can then be used to insert the text at the current cursor position with the UNDELETE LINE command. 5.7 Search and Replace Menu 5.7.1 Search Commands The SEARCH commands allow you to search for any string of characters in the file. The SEARCH command is very fast and even supports simple wildcard searches. To begin a search, use SEARCH FOR (AMIGA-S). A requester will appear with a string gadget where you can type in the string you are searching for. You can specify a forward or backward search, a case sensitive/insensitive search, character search or "only word" search, and you can specify whether or not wildcards will be used. The "only word" option will tell CygnusEd Professional to match the next occurrence of the string specified only if it is a complete word. In effect, this means that you can search for "the" without hitting "then", "bathe", or "lather". It is very useful for programmers when searching for variable names. Technical note: Text found is not considered a word if either the character immediately before or the character immediately afterwards is an alphabetic character, a digit or an underscore. To use the wildcard in searches, you can use the character * to replace any single character. For example, to search for any string beginning with ABC, followed by any two characters, and ending with Z, you would search for ABC**Z. Remember: You must make sure the wildcard search gadget is turned on before you begin your search or CygnusEd Professional will perform a literal search for any asterisks you may have in your search string. When the search requester pops up (when you select SEARCH FOR) there are gadgets you can select to toggle between case sensitive and case insensitive searches, wildcards on and wildcards off and forwards and backwards searches. There are also keyboard shortcuts for all of these (using RIGHT-AMIGA and the first character of the text in the gadget) as well as a Leave keyboard shortcut (RIGHT-AMIGA-l). You might notice that when the search requester is displayed, a new search menu is also active. Use the mouse to look at the menu for reminders on keyboard shortcuts when the search requester is active. Note: In most situations, keyboard shortcuts can be activated in CygnusEd Professional by either the left or the right AMIGA key. When the search requester is active, only the RIGHT AMIGA key will enable keyboard shortcuts. Page 52 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Although control characters do not show up properly in the string gadgets (unless you are using a special font system) they can still be searched for. End-of-line characters can be searched for by typing CTRL-J in the string gadget. An example of doing this would be trying to find the next occurrence of the word VOID at the start of a line. Some font speed-up programs set a new default system font. This can allow the control characters to show up properly in the string gadgets. To find the next occurrence of the string (or the previous), you can use the REPEAT SEARCH FORWARD (AMIGA-s) and the REPEAT SEARCH BACKWARD (AMIGA-a) commands. These will move you to the next occurrence of the same string without displaying the search requester. 5.7.2 Replace Commands The replace commands allow you to selectively replace occurrences of one string of text with another. The replace commands use the same buffer for their original string as the SEARCH command uses for its search string. When you select REPLACE (AMIGA-R), CygnusEd Professional will bring up a requester to let you enter the original and the replacement texts. The requester that comes up is very similar to the SEARCH FOR requester (including all the toggle gadgets). The main difference is that an extra string gadget, for the replacement text, is found at the bottom of the requester. You can specify all the same search attributes here as you can in the SEARCH FOR command (see description above for details). If the cursor is in the second string gadget and you wish to alter the searched-for text, you can move the cursor to the previous string gadget without having to reach for the mouse by typing SHIFT-RETURN. When the first match is found by the search routine, CygnusEd Professional will move the cursor to that location and query you with: "(Y)es/(N)o/(L)ast/(G)lobal/(Q)uit?". To replace this instance and continue to the next instance, answer Y. To NOT replace this instance and continue to the next instance, answer N. To replace this instance and not search for anymore matches, answer L. Page 53 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To replace ALL instances of the original text from this position to the end of the file, enter G. If after typing 'G', you wish to abort the replacement, hit any key. If you wish to stop replacing, hit any key except Y, N, L and G. REPEAT REPLACE (AMIGA-r) can be invoked after a REPLACE command was cancelled. It continues from the current location, using the original and replacement text that you set. Note: Because of the difficulties involved in searching for and replacing invisible characters, CygnusEd Professional always makes escape codes visible before executing the REPLACE commands. 5.7.3 Change Case Commands These commands reverse the case (UPPER or lower) of the character or word the cursor is on. When a word-type command is specified, the word is defined as the current cursor location to the first white space character after the first non-white space character. CHANGE CASE LETTER can be invoked by the keyboard shortcut AMIGA-g while CHANGE CASE WORD can be invoked by AMIGA-G. 5.8 Move Menu 5.8.1 Jump To Line The JUMP TO LINE (AMIGA-j or AMIGA-J) command will move the cursor to any given line number in the file. If the line number specified exceeds the number of lines in the file, the cursor will come to rest at the end of the file. 5.8.2 Jump to Auto-Mark The auto-mark is a fourth bookmark (see the MARK LOCATION n command description above). However this bookmark is not explicitly set by the user. Instead, CygnusEd Professional maintains this bookmark on its own. When you start CygnusEd Professional the auto-mark points to the first line, first column. If continues to point to this location until such time CygnusEd Professional is forced to completely redraw a screen from scratch. When a total screen redraw is forced, the auto-mark is updated to point to the cursor position immediately before the screen redraw. Page 54 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- That is, the auto-mark is updated when you move to a location that is far enough away that it redraws the screen totally rather than scrolling to the new location. For example, if you are somewhere in the middle of a (large) file and go to the end of the document (for example)), the auto-mark will be set to the cursor's location just before you jumped to the end of the document (as long as the end of the document is far enough away that CygnusEd Professional doesn't scroll to it). If you then select JUMP TO AUTO-MARK, CygnusEd Professional will return you to your previous position. The auto-mark will then be set to the end of the document so that you can return there by selecting JUMP TO AUTO-MARK again. In this way, the auto-mark can be used to quickly toggle between two distant points in a large file. If, at some point in the file, you were to SEARCH for a string which was found a great distance away from your original location, you can get back to your original location instantly by JUMPing TO AUTO-MARK. In fact, once back at the original location you can instantly jump back to the location of the found string by again, JUMPing TO AUTO-MARK. Page 55 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 56 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- =================================== Chapter 6 KEYBOARD COMMANDS AND SHORTCUTS =================================== 6.1 Menu Use From the Keyboard Because many people prefer to keep their hands on the keyboard all the time (rather than reaching for the mouse every time they want to execute a menu command), almost all frequently used commands in CygnusEd Professional can be invoked with COMMSEQs (command sequence shortcuts or "keyboard" shortcuts using an AMIGA key and another key on the keyboard). Even a lot of non-menu commands, such as toggling of the gadget in the search/replace requester, can be done from the keyboard. The keyboard shortcuts are shown at the right edge of the menus, immediately after the stylized "A" (which signifies the AMIGA keys). Note that because CygnusEd Professional has so many menu operation, we have set up the menus to distinguish between shifted and unshifted keys in many cases. For example, to SAVE, you would press an AMIGA-key with "w". To SAVE AS, you would press an AMIGA-key and a SHIFT key with "w". The CAPS LOCK light does not affect this. Shortcuts that share the same key are shown in the menus as "w" and "W" - lowercase for one, uppercase for the other. Page 57 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note that unlike many programs, CygnusEd Professional allows you to use either the right or the left AMIGA key for the keyboard shortcuts (with the exception of AMIGA-N and AMIGA-M, which can only be used with the right AMIGA key because the system uses Left AMIGA N and M to push the WorkBench screen to the front and back respectively). We tried to make as many menu commands as possible have keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, due to the finite size of the Amiga keyboard, some menu commands do not have keyboard short cuts. If you find you are regularly calling on a command that has no shortcut key, consider assigning a macro definition to it. Macro definitions can contain any number of menu or keyboard commands and are called with one or more keystrokes. For further information on using keyboard macros, see section 9, USING MACROS EFFECTIVELY. 6.2 Use of the Cursor Keys We have tried to make movement through a file as intuitive as possible. Most movement through the file is done with the cursor keys and optionally one of either the CTRL key, the SHIFT keys or the ALT keys. The MOVE menu acts as a "cheat sheet" to remind you which extra key do what, but they are generally quite intuitive and easy to remember. For example, moving to the beginning or end of a line is accomplished with the same command that Intuition uses for moving from the beginning to the end of a string gadget: SHIFT-LEFT/RIGHT arrow key. CygnusEd Professional can instantly go into a keyboard based "turbo" scroll mode, where it will scroll twice as fast as normal. To go into this mode, you hold down the cursor key in the direction you want to go, and once it begins, you can press ALT (and hold it down). You will now be going considerable faster, you still scrolling smoothly. Just release the ALT key to resume normal scroll speed. If you want to double the speed yet again, press the SHIFT key as well. You can continue to hold down one of the arrow keys and alternately press and release ALT and/or the SHIFT key to move through a file at three different speeds. (In addition to the keyboard based turbo scroll mode, recall that depressing the left mouse button towards the top or bottom of the screen will also launch you into turbo scroll mode with the speed of the scroll varying with the relative location of the mouse.) Page 58 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6.3 Screen Shifting Because CygnusEd Professional allows you to use "overscan" screens (screens that extend beyond the normal width and height of a standard Amiga screen), CygnusEd Professional provides the ability to shift your screen around (in much the same way as the Preferences program) so that the additional screen resolution can be displayed on a standard Amiga monitor. Use the SHIFT and CTRL keys together with the arrow key pointing in the direction you want the display to move. While there are limitations to the movement you will be capable of, these should be far from anything you should need. Overscan modes can be selected from the Screen Width and Screen Height menus. Note that selecting a large overscan screen (especially in interlace mode) will consume more chip memory than a standard sized screen. 6.4 Using Requesters With the Keyboard Early on inthe development of CygnusEd Professional, we found that some programs would display a requester in a keyboard-oriented program but require the user to reach for the mouse to acknowledge it. We decided that a less cumbersome alternative would be to allow the keyboard to acknowledge these requester as well and as a consequence all requesters in CygnusEd Professional have keyboard shortcuts. The most common request to appear is the one that gives you a message and either asks for a you/so answer or just waits for you to tell it to resume. You can acknowledge these with the mouse (they do try to appear with the cancel button right under the mouse), or, you can answer these from the keyboard. To say YES simply type "Y", "R" (for Resume), "C" (for Continue) or LEFT-AMIGA-V (standard on all Yes/NO type Intuition requesters). To say NO WAY! simply type "N", "Q", "ESC" or LEFT-AMIGA_B (standard on all Yes/No type Intuition requesters). Another requester that is frequently used is the search/replace requester. If you depress the right mouse button when this requester is visible you will see that there is a small menu attached to it. This menu lets you toggle case sensitivity, wildcards, only words and forwards/backwards. All these menu commands, which are gadgets in the search or replace requester, also have keyboard shortcuts. This provides three ways of changing the settings in the search/replace requester: The gadget, the menu, and the keyboard. Page 59 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- In addition to letting you toggle the state of the search/replace gadgets these menu shortcuts also let you exit from the search/replace requester from the keyboard. Simply select 'leave', or use the keyboard shortcut AMIGA L to leave the search/replace requester. Another way to cancel a search is to clear the string gadget, using the Intuition keyboard shortcut AMIGA-X, and then hit return on the empty string gadget. A third type of requester requires a number, such as ENTER ASCII or JUMP TO LINE. You can cancel this requester by clicking on the close gadget, by hitting return without typing anything in or by typing AMIGA l (for Leave) which is a keyboard shortcut for a small menu attached to the requester. The file requester has many keyboard shortcuts - these are all described in the USE OF THE FILE REQUESTER section of this manual. 6.5 Auto-Indent Pressing the RETURN key will break the current line into two parts at the cursor's current position and put the second half onto a newly created line. If the cursor is at the right hand end of the line then the new line will be empty. One feature of CygnusEd Professional that programmers will appreciate is the auto-indent key. In order to preserve the indentation of the current line when making a new line, simply press ENTER or SHIFT-RETURN. This will open up a new line with all the initial tabs and spaces of the previous line. (The previous line will not be broken as it would if you simply pressed RETURN with the cursor located in the center of the line). 6.6 Using the Mouse Another very intuitive method of cursor movement provided in CygnusEd Professional is using the mouse to position the cursor. To do this, simply position the mouse where you want the cursor to be and click the left mouse button. The cursor will continue to follow the mouse until you release the left mouse button. If you move the mouse outside of the "scroll border" (see the SET SCROLL BORDERS command description for more information) the file will scroll. How fast it scrolls depends on how far beyond the scroll borders the mouse is. Therefore you can scroll through a file at varying speeds simply by moving the mouse near the top or bottom of the screen. Page 60 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The mouse can also be used to select a block of text. By clicking the left mouse button twice on a single location, a block mark will take effect in the same fashion as though the menu command MARK BLOCK had been selected. 6.7 Built-in Escape Sequence Macros When the CAPS LOCK key is lit, CygnusEd Professional deals with the function keys differently than when it is not lit. When the CAPS LOCK key is not lit, the function keys are assigned to DOS/ARexx commands or macro key definitions or nothing. When lit, the function keys represent several banks of common escape code sequences. Escape codes are the AMIGA standard method of sending special commands to the printer or other display device. This includes bold facing and underlining characters, changing colors, setting subscripts and superscripts, italics, etc. Note that CygnusEd Professional can not actually display underlined, italicized or bold faced text but these attributes will be present in printed or displayed text outside of CygnusEd Professional. When you enter escape codes, it is advisable to make sure that CygnusEd Professional is set to ESCAPE CODES VISIBLE in the WHITE SPACES submenu under VIEW SETTINGS - otherwise, you won't be able to see what escape code you've entered! If you want to use other escape codes that CygnusEd Professional doesn't have built-in, please refer to the Rom Kernal Reference Manual: Libraries And Devices (publ. Addison Wesley) for a complete list of the escape codes supported by the console and printer devices. Here is an index of the built-in macros accessed via the function keys with the CAPS LOCK light lit: --------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Set attr. | Clr attr. | Set fgcol | Set bgcol | Set pitch | |---------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------| |Func. Key| F1 | F2 | F3 | F4 | F5 | | CTRL | Underline | Underline§| color 3 | color 3 | Enlarged§ | | SHIFT | Italics | Italics§ | color 2 | color 2 | Condensed§| | ALT | Bold Face | Bold Face§| color 1 | color 1 | Elite§ | | NONE | Clear All | Clear All | color 0 | color 0 | Normal§ | --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------- §These control codes are for printer only. The "Console Device" will not understand these codes. Page 61 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Clr Pitch | Set Pitch | Clr Pitch | Misc. | Misc. | |---------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------| |Func. Key| F6 | F7 | F8 | F9 | F10 | | CTRL | Enlarged |SuperScript| SubScript | 1/6 spc§ | | | SHIFT | Condensed | NLQ | NLQ | NLQ | Date | | ALT | Elite | Dbl Strike| Dbl Strike| Prop off | Time | | NONE | Normal | Shadow | Shadow | Prop on | Time/Date | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Not all printers will support all escape codes. Note that when a file containing escape codes is printed the escape codes do not show up. However they do affect the printout by changing the type to bold, underline, superscript etc. Usually the escape codes will be visible in your file. However you can switch off the ESC CODES VISIBLE option from the WHITE SPACES sub-menu of the VIEW SETTINGS menu to hide them from view. This is useful since it reduces the visual distraction and helps to give a better idea of what the file will look like when printed. When escape codes are hidden, the only indication of where they are is that the character after them is highlit (reversed). Deleting this highlighted character (when escape codes are hidden) will also delete all the escape codes attached to it and reinserting that character will reinsert the escape codes as well. Unfortunately CygnusEd Professional does not "process" escape codes (i.e., CygnusEd Professional will not show text as underlined or bold). It is important to remember that the codes are still there, even if they are invisible. Due to the difficulties involved in adding in characters that immediately become invisible we recommend that any editing or insertion of escape codes be done while escape codes are visible. 6.8 Tips for Alphabetic Accents There are many different characters that the Amiga can display beyond the basic A to Z and 1 to 9. Many extra characters can be accessed by pressing ALT together with another key or ALT and SHIFT and another key. Exactly what characters appear for various keypresses depends on what "keymap" is loaded in. Keymaps are loaded into your Amiga computer with the setmap command. From the CLI type "setmap keymapname" to set the keymap. The setmap program allows you to set your keyboard up as a standard North American keyboard (QWERTY), a European keyboard, as a Dvorak keyboard or many other ways. The setmap program and several keymaps are provided on the 1.2 WorkBench disk from Commodore. Many languages use special accents on their alphabetic characters to designate different sounds or meanings of the words. The Amiga accommodates these very well. Page 62 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: The following assumes that the user is using the default USA1 keymap provided with the Amiga WorkBench and a compatible font. When the ALT key is held down, and the alphabetic keys are pressed, many different symbols and characters can be generated. Accented vowels can be generated by using a two-keystroke method. By pressing ALT an done of F, G, H, J, or K, and then pressing either a vowel or the space bar alone, a single accented character will result. The F, G, H, J, and K (all conveniently located on the "home row" of a North American keyboard) have special meanings when the ALT key is pressed: ALT-F means add an acute accent (ó) to the next vowel. ALT-G means add a grave accent (ò) to the next vowel. ALT-H means add a circumflex (ô) to the next vowel. ALT-J means add a tilde accent (ñ) to the next vowel (or "n"). ALT-K means add an umlaut (ö) to the next vowel. Page 63 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 64 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================= Chapter 7 USE OF THE FILE REQUESTER ============================= 7.1 Description The CygnusEd Professional file requester is a powerful, intuitive and friendly file requester that helps you to select a file name, without forcing you to wait for it to read in a complete directory list. The CygnusEd Professional file requester displays a list of all available devices in a box in the right half of the requester. First in the list are all the available disks (such as DF0: and RAM:). Next is a list of all of the logical assignments (such as S:, SYS:, L:, C: etc.). These are the names that are set with the CLI ASSIGN command. Next is a list of al of the volume names present in the system. These are the names of disks (like CopyOfWorkbench). The large box on the left side of the file requester is where the list of files in the current directory goes. These lists are printed in two colors, one for directories inside the directory and the other for files. When the file requester appears, the path name of the file you were editing is placed inthe file name and directory string gadgets. The file name directory gadget is automatically active. The file requester immediately begins reading in a list of all the files in the directory. You do not have to wait for the file requester to finish reading in the entire directory to be read in. Page 65 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (If you have a floppy disk based system (no hard disks or ram disks of appreciable size) you might consider purchasing the FaccII Floppy Accelerator from ASDG. FaccII will dramatically increase the speed of file requester operation). 7.2 Controlling the File Requester With the Keyboard When the cursor is visible in the file name gadget you can type in a file name and then press return. If you want to change the directories first, you can move the cursor to the directory name by pressing SHIFT-RETURN or by moving th mouse over the directory name gadget and depressing the left mouse button. When the cursor is on the directory name you can type in a new directory name and press RETURN to tell the file requester to start getting a list of files in that directory. This will also move the cursor back to the file name gadget. Alternately you can press SHIFT-RETURN to move the cursor back to the file name gadget without telling the directory gadget to start getting a list of files in that directory. When the cursor is on either the file name gadget or the directory name gadget there are a number of keyboard shortcuts you can use to help in editing the text. RIGHT-AMIGA-x will clear out the name. RIGHT-AMIGA-q will restore the name to what it was when the cursor first appeared there. SHIFT-LEFT-ARROW and SHIFT-RIGHT-ARROW will move the cursor to the beginning and end of the name respectively. The left and right arrows will move the cursor left and right one character. The delete and backspace keys delete the character to the left of the cursor and under the cursor respectively. If you change your mind an don't want to select a file, you can clear the file name gadget (with RIGHT-AMIGA-x or with the backspace and delete keys) and hit RETURN. This will return a null name to CygnusEd Professional which will cancel the operation that brought up the file requester (or select the "Forget It" gadget in the file requester). Page 66 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7.3 With the Mouse If you want to get a list of all the files in the root directory of one of the disks, logicals or volumes listed in the box on the right, simply click on the name or icon with the mouse. If the file requester has finished reading in the list of files for the directory, you can move around the list with the slide bar gadget and arrow gadgets to the right of the box. Directories contained in the current directory (i.e., sub-directories of the current directory) will be listed in black. By clicking on a line containing the name of a directory, CygnusEd Professional will begin reading in the contents of the sub-directory. Files will be displayed in white. Clicking on a file name will cause it to be highlighted and copied into the file name gadget near the bottom of the file requester. If you double click on a file name, then the file requester will return with the selected name, causing the selected file to be loaded by CygnusEd Professional (bypassing the need to select the OK gadget). To see the contents of the parent directory of the currently displayed directory, click on the PARENT gadget. The GET DIR gadget is to force the file requester to re-read the directory from the disk. The CygnusEd Professional file requester "remembers" the last directory read in order to cut down on the number of times the same directory will be read. The GET DIR gadget forces the file requester to forget the remembered directory list and read in a new directory list from the disk. This should be used whenever the list of file names becomes out of date. Note that an empty directory string gadget will refer to the current directory as it was when CygnusEd Professional was first started up. The OK gadget can be used when you've selected the file name you want and wish it to be loaded by CygnusEd Professional. Clicking on this gadget with a file selected is the same as having double clicked upon the file name. The FORGET IT gadget is used when you change your mind and don't want to select a file. It will cancel the operation that brought up the file requester. This can also be accomplished by using AMIGA-l (for Leave) or entering a null (or empty) file name. Page 67 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 68 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================== Chapter 8 STORING PREFERRED SETTINGS ============================== You can store your environment settings in a file which will automatically be loaded by CED when you start the editor. This "default" file is useful once you have set up the environment configuration that best strikes your fancy. By saving the settings, you won't have to reset different attributes each time you start CED. A defaults file stores all the settings in the Environment Menus, including the Global, File, and View parameters. When you run CygnusEd Professional it looks to see if there is a default file it should load settings in from. If you specified a file when you ran the editor then it will try to load a defaults file for that type of file. It does this by taking the suffix of the file (the characters after the period in the file name) and prepending it to CEDDEFAULTS. It then looks in the current directory and then in the S: directory (which is normally on your WorkBench disk). By allowing different defaults files to be loaded based upon the file you wish to edit, several sets of defaults files can be maintained which will configure CygnusEd Professional in different ways for different applications. For example, one settings file can be maintained for C program editing, while a different settings file can be used for editing text documents. This adaptability can be carried a step further by also maintaining separate macro definition files for different uses of CygnusEd Professional. See the section of macro definitions. Page 69 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you didn't specify a file to be loaded when you ran the editor, or if there isn't a defaults file for that type of file then CygnusEd Professional will try to load in the defaults file for that type of file then CygnusEd Professional will try to load in the "default" default file. This file is simply called CEDDEFAULTS and will be looked for in first the current directory and then the S: directory. To summarize where CygnusEd Professional will look for default files when you run it: (current directory) CEDDEFAULTS.sfx S:CEDDEFAULTS.sfx (current directory) CEDDEFAULTS S:CEDDEFAULTS where "sfx" is the suffix of the file being edited (if there is one). CED will use the first file in this list that it finds. If none of these files can be found, then the environment settings used will be the ones built in to the program (i.e., the default default default settings (sorry - couldn't resist)). To save your settings, select "SAVE ENVIRONMENT" in the Global Settings of Environment. CED will ask for a filename, defaulting to the S:CEDDEFAULTS.sfx version. To explicitly load your settings, you can select "LOAD ENVIRONMENT/DEFAULT" or "LOAD ENVIRONMENT/SPECIFY...". LOAD ENVIRONMENT/DEFAULT loads in the same default file that would be loaded if you ran the editor and specified the current file to be loaded. That is CygnusEd Professional tries to read in CEDDEFAULTS.sfx, then S:CEDDEFAULTS.sfx, then CEDDEFAULTS and then S:CEDDEFAULTS. If you select LOAD ENVIRONMENT/SPECIFY then CygnusEd Professional brings up the file requester and lets you specify which defaults file you would like to load. Example: If you run CED with a file called "README.TXT", then CED will try to find the file "CEDDEFAULTS.TXT", then "S:CEDDEFAULTS.TXT", then "CEDDEFAULTS", and last "S:CEDDEFAULTS". As soon as one of these files is found, CED will use it as the defaults file and will stop looking for others. Page 70 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================ Chapter 9 USING MACROS EFFECTIVELY ============================ The macro key definition functions in CED let you automate repetitive operation, create your own keyboard shortcuts for menu operations that lack them, or expand the utility of the editor. You can assign a macro to a single keystroke or to a string of keystrokes (ala MicroEmacs). Macros can be assigned to any key on the numeric keypad, to the function keys or to any key on the main keyboard, al long as you also press ALT or Control. Macros can be assigned to: -------------------------------------------------------------- | Key | Valid Qualifiers | |---------------|----------------------------------------------| | F1 to F10 | none, ALT, CTRL, SHIFT, or any combination | | Keypad keys | none, ALT, CTRL, SHIFT, or any combination | | Main Keyboard | ALT, CTRL or any combination | -------------------------------------------------------------- By using different combinations of ALT, CTRL and SHIFT you can assign many macros to the same key. If you are using a string of keystrokes to invoke a macro, the extra keys (past the first key) can be any key on the keyboard. Of course you can't assign a macro to a key such as ALT or CTRL itself, or to the arrow keys. Page 71 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To define a macro, you select BEGIN DEFINITION from the menu (or press AMIGA-M). You then enter the initial key to invoke the macro with. A requester now appears, asking if you would like to use more keystrokes to invoke the macro. Usually you will answer "no" to this requester. If you answer "yes" then you enter the subsequent keystrokes used to invoke the macro. For example to define CTRL-S to swap the letter the cursor is on for the character immediately following it (the equivalent of "xp" in VI), you would do the following: Press: AMIGA-M ;To start defining the macro. CTRL-S ;To specify what key to attach the macro to. N ;To specify only one key to invoke the macro. DEL ;Delete the character under the cursor. RIGHT ARROW ;Move the cursor over. CTRL-DEL ;Undelete the first character. LEFT ARROW ;Return to original position. AMIGA-M ;End the macro definition. From then on, pressing CTRL-S will swap the letter the cursor is on with its successor. Macro keys remain in memory for as long as CED is running, unless you select CLEAR DEFINITIONS or LOAD DEFINITIONS or replace a single macro invocation with something else. Macros are effective in all windows (or views). To store your macro keys so they will automatically be available whenever you start CED, select SAVE DEFINITIONS. This will store the macros in a file. By default, this file is called S:CEDMACROS. CygnusEd Professional looks for an S:CEDMACROS file if it doesn't find a CEDMACROS file in the current directory when you run CygnusEd Professional. To load a macro file explicitly (by specifying the file name), you can select LOAD DEFINITIONS. By maintaining several sets of macro files, you can custom tailor CygnusEd Professional for each type of file you might work upon. For example, a set of C programming language macros might be nice when programming. Or perhaps a set of macros tailored to your favorite document formatter. Page 72 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is an example that was used while writing this manual. A macro was written which was used to insert the string "CygnusEd Professional" with the touch of one key. It was set up as follows: AMIGA-M ;To start defining the macro. F10 ;To specify what key to attach the macro to. N ;Only one key to invoke this macro. CygnusEd Professional ;Text to be inserted into document. AMIGA-M ;End the macro definition. Page 73 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 74 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- =================== Chapter 10 ADVANCED TOPICS =================== 10.1 HOT Keys And Dormancy When you are using CygnusEd Professional you may find that you are constantly entering and exiting out of the editor, only to start it up again moments later. If you have CygnusEd Professional on a floppy drive then this is inefficient because it takes a while to load CygnusEd Professional from floppy. If you have CygnusEd Professional on a ram disk then this is inefficient because when you are using CygnusEd Professional there are actually two copies in memory, one in the ram disk and the other being executed. The HOT-START function of CygnusEd Professional is designed to fix this problem. With this feature of CygnusEd Professional enabled you can make CygnusEd Professional stay in memory when you exit so that it can be revived with a hot key, a CLI program or a WorkBench program. CygnusEd Professional provides two "NOT KEYS" that CygnusEd Professional will hear from anywhere on the Amiga (CygnusEd Professional doesn't have to be the active window to hear them!). These two commands will tell a CygnusEd Professional that is already running somewhere on the system to become active or to kill itself off. The HOT-Start Enabled mode (set in the GLOBAL SETTINGS menu) will cause CygnusEd Professional to become dormant when you quit out of the last view CygnusEd Professional is displaying. This dormancy is a state where CygnusEd Professional is still in memory, but is waiting for one of the HOT keys or the ED activator program (provided with CygnusEd Professional, see also ED - THE CygnusEd Professional ACTIVATOR) to be executed. Page 75 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The reason you would want to leave CygnusEd Professional dormant in memory is because then you don't have to load it from the disk the next time you use it. In fact, you don't even have to type the command line, or click on any icons, if you don't want to. To allow CygnusEd Professional to become dormant after you are finished editing, you must first activate the HOT-Start Enabled option, otherwise CygnusEd Professional will exit completely. If the option is activated, then when you quit the last view, CygnusEd Professional will become dormant and wait for one of the following: 1. HOT-START Pressing RIGHT-ALT + RIGHT-SHIFT + RETURN together will cause CygnusEd Professional to start up with a clear file instantly. You can use this while CygnusEd Professional is open already; the CygnusEd Professional screen will pop to the front and become the active window. When CygnusEd Professional is dormant it does its best to reduce the amount of memory it consumes. 2. HOT-KILL RIGHT-ALT + RIGHT-SHIFT + CONTROL + RETURN together will cause a dormant CygnusEd Professional to kill itself off completely. This will free up the memory that a dormant CygnusEd Professional takes up (because a dormant CygnusEd Professional is still in memory). If CygnusEd Professional is open already then the CygnusEd Professional screen will pop to the front and become the active window (and NOT be killed off). 3. ED ACTIVATOR The ED program provided on the CygnusEd Professional distribution disk will pass file name(s) to CygnusEd Professional to edit. If CygnusEd Professional is dormant at the time, it will activate CygnusEd Professional much the same as HOT-START does. See Section 13 - ED - THE CygnusEd Professional ACTIVATOR for more information on ED. CygnusEd Professional can be started up initially in a dormant state without displaying a screen at all. Many people will find this very useful as they can then start up CygnusEd Professional in their S:Startup-Sequence script and then have CygnusEd Professional available on call with the HOT-START sequence. Page 76 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To start CygnusEd Professional up as dormant, you must use the CLI or modify your Startup-Sequence to contain the line: CED -r CygnusEd Professional will then load into memory and will become dormant, waiting for a signal via the HOT keys or ED. CygnusEd Professional is designed to detach itself from the invoking CLI so that the invoking CLI can itself be closed without waiting for CygnusEd Professional to terminate. Thus "CED -r" in a startup-sequence will not interfere with the initial CLI closing at the end of the startup-sequence with an "EndCLI". However, if CygnusEd Professional has been disconnected from its invoking CLI, then it will no longer be able to execute DOS commands (ARexx commands will still function however). To keep CygnusEd Professional from disconnecting itself from the invoking CLI, use the "-keepio" command line option. This will allow DOS commands to be launched from within CygnusEd Professional. If you elect to use -keepio then you should "run" CygnusEd Professional so that your CLI will continue to be available for your use while CygnusEd Professional is running. More information on this can be found in the "Executing DOS commands" section. 10.2 Starting CygnusEd Professional With Multiple Files When you start up CygnusEd Professional, you can specify more than one file (up to 10, in fact). When you do, all the files you have specified will be loaded in and displayed in seperate views. From the CLI, just enter: CED file1 file2 file3 From the WorkBench, you can use the extended-select feature of the WorkBench. This is done by clicking on the first file once with your left mouse button, then hold the SHIFT key down while clicking once on the next file(s). When you have selected all the files you want to edit, click twice on the CED icon - while still holding the SHIFT key down. If one of the files you want to edit has CygnusEd Professional as its "default tool" (program that gets run when you double click on it) then you can double click last on this file instead of on the CED icon. Page 77 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10.3 Using the Columnar Block Effectively A feature which sets CygnusEd Professional apart from most editors is CygnusEd Professional's ability to operate on vertical as well as horizontal blocks. The common MARK BLOCK method (for horizontal blocks) is used most often, but a second method COLUMNAR BLOCK (for vertical blocks) is also supported. With this alternate method, you can select any rectangular area in the document to copy or cut, and then paste. You can use it to shift text horizontally, format your text into multiple columns, move diagrams around, etc. 10.3.1 Shifting Text Horizontally It is often helpful to move a piece of text to a different horizontal or vertical position. For example, say we want to move a diagram or a table to a different area on the screen. We would select one corner of the area to be moved (the diagram) using MARK COLUMNAR BLOCK and then move the cursor to the opposite corner of the rectangular section to be moved. We then CUT BLOCK to remove the area from its original location into the block buffer. Then we position our cursor to the corner of the area where we want to insert the area and use INSERT BLOCK to move it into place there. Note that vertical block operations are normally done with LAYOUT mode ON in the FILE SETTINGS menu. LAYOUT mode means that you can move the cursor anywhere on the screen, even beyond the EOL character (beyond the physical ends of lines). This allows you to go far enough over to the right to mark the columnar block, even though the line you are on may not extend that far. Having CygnusEd Professional in LAYOUT mode also ensures that the diagram will be padded on the left with spaces where necessary to keep all the lines of the block neatly lined up. If you are not in LAYOUT mode when you insert a columnar block then the individual lines will be tacked onto the ends of the lines already there. 10.3.2 Making Multi-Column Text Files You might want to format some text into multiple columns. This format, used in newspapers and most other printed media, is available in limited form in CygnusEd Professional by using the COLUMNAR BLOCK commands. Page 78 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- For example, let us say that we have two paragraphs which we want side by side in columns, format-filled (left- and right- justified) to 36 characters wide each, with a four character space between the two columns. Here is the method to do this: First, make sure LAYOUT mode is on, then set the right border to column 36. Then use the FORMAT WITH FILL (AMIGA-f) command to reformat each paragraph. Now you have both paragraphs format-filled as 36 character-wide columns - but they are still end-to-end in the same column. Next, use the MARK COLUMNAR BLOCK to mark the beginning of the second paragraph and go to the end of the paragraph and select CUT BLOCK. Be sure that you go far enough to the right to mark the entire paragraph. This will move the block out of the document and into CygnusEd Professional's buffer. Lastly, move the cursor to the first line of the first paragraph, but go to column 40. This is the corner at which you want to paste the other column, so select PASTE BLOCK. You now have two paragraphs side by side in 36 character columns, format-filled with a four character gap between them! Note: As you can see, this method is useful only when the text you have written is not likely to require changing later, since CygnusEd Professional does not think of columnar text as such. Moving the text this way should be the last change you make to your document. 10.4 Converting Tabs And Spaces With Print Functions CygnusEd Professional provides the ability to convert tabs to spaces and vice versa. To convert a file or a paste block, you use the Print commands in the PROJECT menu. When you have specified where the output will go (i.e., the printer PRT: device, or a file name), CygnusEd Professional will ask you if you want to convert from TABS to SPACES or from SPACES to TABS. For example, you are working on an assembly language program and use irregular tabs stops ( a tab stop for instruction, parameter, comments). If you "type" this file to the printer device then it will not be printed properly, since the printer device and your printer think of tabstops as being placed at regular intervals. If you want to print this file out to your printer, select TABS to SPACES after selecting print file an deselecting the output file (or PRT:). This will automatically replace all existing tab characters with the appropriate number of spaces - so your printer doesn't need to be programmed with your peculiar tab settings. Page 79 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another important use of this function is if you have a file with tabs of one size or setting and want to convert it to tabs of another size or setting, without affecting the position of the text, you can use the TABS to SPACES output with the old format in effect, then read in the output file (containing now tabs) and change to the new TAB settings. YOU can then PRINT the file again with the SPACES to TABS option - your file looks the same as it did before, but has the new tab sizes or settings. For another example, a use who has written a document with the ED screen editor (provided with WorkBench) wants to convert to actual tabs of length 3. He would use the SPACES to TABS setting on the PRINT options to automatically entab the file. Page 80 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================== Chapter 11 THE DOS/ARexx INTERFACE =========================== 11.1 Description ARexx is an interpreted language for the Amiga with the built in ability to send commands to and receive commands from other programs. ARexx programs can be written to control the operation of other programs that have an ARexx interface built in. CygnusEd Professional has an extremely powerful ARexx interface built into it. ARexx is a commercial product, available in computer stores or direct from it's author, William Hawes. For those who don't wish to purchase ARexx, it is possible to control CygnusEd Professional using ARexx style commands from any language on the Amiga. It will usually not be as simple as doing it from ARexx, since ARexx is specifically designed for that purpose, but powerful controlling functions can be built into other programs to allow them to smoothly interface with CygnusEd Professional. A parallel feature is the ability to execute DOS commands from CygnusEd Professional. This allows two way communications with non-ARexx programs as well as ARexx programs. Page 81 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The best way to explain the benefits of having an ARexx interface is with an example. Having an integrated programming environment can make software development much easier. Typically the compiler is built into the editor and you can compile, link and run the program with a single keypress. This in itself is no big advantage, the real advantage comes when some errors are encountered in the compilation. Then because the editor is integrated with the compiler, a single keystroke can position the cursor over the first error while a description of the error appears at the bottom of the screen. After correcting that error another keystroke takes you to the next error, or a different keystroke takes you back to the previous error. The main disadvantage of an integrated environment is that if you want it's benefits, you are forced to use their editor, even if you don't particularly like it. An ARexx interface will allow you to set up your favorite ARexx equipped text editor (CygnusEd Professional) to behave like an integrated editor, with single key compile, link and run and single keystroke next/prev error commands. 11.2 Sending Commands to ARexx In the SPECIAL menu there is an entry called 'DOS/ARexx interface'. There is a subitem list attached to this entry which contains the following entries: Send DOS/ARexx command Install DOS/ARexx command Load DOS/ARexx commands Save DOS/ARexx commands command #1 - F1 command #2 - F2 command #3 - F3 and so on... To send a command to ARexx, simply select the "Send DOS/ARexx command' menu item. A requester will pop up, asking for the command. Type in the command you wish to run followed by a carriage return. You send any command to ARexx, but typically you'll send the name of an ARexx program that you have written. ARexx will look for the program in the current directory and in the REXX: directory. If you don't put a file extension on the file, CygnusEd Professional will also try looking for the file name with ".ced" appended to it. You may also store ARexx commands for use with the function keys using the 'Install DOS/ARexx command' menu option. When you select "Install DOS/ARexx command, CygnusEd Professional will prompt you for which slot (corresponding to the ten function keys) you want the command put into. Then CygnusEd Professional will prompt you for the command itself. Page 82 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now that you have installed a command, it can be sent to ARexx simply by selecting it's menu entry with the mouse. Alternatively it can be sent by pressing the corresponding function key, as long as no macro has been assigned to that key. The ARexx commands can also be assigned to any key, using the macro functions documented elsewhere in the manual. Simply assign a macro consisting of the menu selection to the key you want to invoke it with. After you've installed a number of ARexx commands you can save them to a file so that they will be automatically loaded the next time you run CygnusEd Professional. The "Save ARexx commands" command is used for this purpose. The default file name is "S:RexxCommands". If yo9u save the file there, it will automatically be loaded and the commands installed when you run the editor. The RexxCommands file is looked for first in the current directory, then in the S: directory. The "Load ARexx commands" command can be used to load in any secondary command files you may create. Note that new commands loaded in will overwrite ALL of the old commands. 11.3 Executing DOS commands from CygnusEd Professional DOS commands may be executed from CygnusEd Professional if four conditions are met. Those conditions are: 1) CygnusEd Professional must be started up from a CLI window, 2) CygnusEd Professional must be "run" with the AmigaDOS run command, 3) the -keepio option must be specified when CygnusEd Professional is run, and 4) the AmigaDOS "run" command is present in your C: directory. If these conditions are not met, only ARexx commands can be run from CygnusEd Professional. The proper startup command looks like this: run ced -keepio The CLI window is used to allow DOS commands performed from CygnusEd Professional to have an input/output window. The editor must be "run" to keep the CLI window active. The -keepio option tells CygnusEd Professional to remain attached to the CLI window it was called from. Without the -keepio option enabled, CygnusEd Professional disconnects itself from the CLI window, allowing the window to be closed (using EndCLI) while CygnusEd Professional is still running. Page 83 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Assuming you have started CygnusEd Professional from a CLI window, using "run ced -keepio", you can execute DOS commands by first selecting Install DOS/ARexx Command or using Send DOS/ARexx Command. Rather than entering an ARexx command, enter the DOS command you wish to execute. You can execute this command as you would one of the ARexx commands (described above). CygnusEd Professional will attempt to send the command to ARexx. If ARexx is not present in your system or indicates, if it is present, that it doesn't make sense of the command, CygnusEd Professional submits the command for execution by the CLI. CygnusEd Professional "run"s the program, so the AmigaDOS run command must be in your C: directory. Since CygnusEd Professional runs the program, control returns to the editor immediately so that you can continue editing while the program executes. Unfortunately there is no way to tell whether the program was successfully run from the editor. If the program prints a completion message to the CLI screen, you can jump back to that screen and see if it completed properly. Remember that you can use the output redirection capability of the CLI to send the output of your DOS commands to a file which can then be loaded into CygnusEd Professional. Please consult your AmigaDos manual for more information about output redirection. When CygnusEd Professional runs a program it resets as many things as possible to the way they were when CygnusEd Professional was first run. This means that the new program will be running at the priority CygnusEd Professional started at and on the same screen for DOS requester to appear on. Note: A limitation of the DOS command execution facility is that CygnusEd Professional will be unaware of any directories which may have been added to your "PATH". That is, CygnusEd Professional will only be able to execute programs which are located in C: or in the current directory. 11.3.1 Using Change Current Directory With DOS Commands By Default, the current directory from which any DOS command execution will be based, is the directory you were in when you started CygnusEd Professional. To change the current directory to another location, use the "Change Current Directory" command located in the PROJECT menu. For example, if df0: was your current directory when you started CygnusEd Professional from the CLI, executing a "Dir" from inside the editor will produce a directory of df0:. If you wished to view the df1: directory you can either execute "Dir Df1:" from inside the editor or Change Current Directory to Df1: and execute "Dir". Page 84 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11.4 Receiving Commands From ARexx If you want to send commands from an ARexx program to CygnusEd Professional, you first have to tell ARexx of your desire. This is done with the ARexx "ADDRESS" command, like this: ADDRESS 'rexx_ced' This is not necessary if the ARexx program will be invoked from within CygnusEd Professional as this is done automatically in that case. 11.4.1 Menu Commands You now have access to over a hundred CygnusEd Professional commands from ARexx. Most of these commands are from the menus. These commands can be executed simply by typing their name, from the menus, into the ARexx program. For instance, if you want to move the cursor to the top of the current file, you an use the "beg of file" command from the "Move" menu, like this: beg of file The complete command name must be used, complete with spaces. The commands are not case sensitive, and any periods or question marks at the end of the command can be left off if desired. Therefore, the "search for..." command can be entered in any of these ways: search for... search for SEARCH FOR sEARCH fOR The only menu selections that can not be easily accessed this way are some whose text changes (like the ARexx commands in the ARexx interface menu) or those like the tab sizes which are only a single number. These menu selections can be accessed from ARexx programs with the "menu" command. The "menu" command takes two or three parameters. The first is the menu number, from 0 (for the PROJECT menu) to 7 (for the MOVE menu). The second parameter is the item number, which is a number from 0 to the number of items minus 1. If there are any subitems then the third parameter is needed. It specifies the subitem number, from 0 to the number of items minus 1. For example, if you want to set the tab size to eight you can use the menu command like this: Page 85 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- menu 2 1 7 Or you can set the screen width to 640 like this: menu 1 2 0 Menu commands with an elipsis (three periods in a row) expect additional parameters. Examples are "Open...", which wants a file name, and "Jump to line...", which wants a line number. If you just put he command's name in the ARexx program then the usual requester will be brought up. However you can also put the parameter right in the ARexx program. For instance: open sys:s/startup-sequence jump to line 150 If a command normally brings up one of the information requesters (like the "All macro definitions cleared" message after using the "clear definitions" command) or one of the yes/no requesters (like the "156 changes have been make to manual. They will be lost. Ok to continue" that shows up if you try to exit without saving), you can get ARexx to respond to the requester for you, without it even showing up. If you put a 1 (for yes) or a 0 (for no) after the command that will normally bring up the requester. The 1 or 0 will make the requester not appear, and CygnusEd Professional will act as if you hit the corresponding gadget. The requesters that just bring up information and have only one requester gadget, can be made to not appear with either a 0 or a 1. Therefore, if you want to clear the current file and you don't care if you lose any changes, go like this: clear 1 Any time that one of these text message requesters comes up, the text from the requester is returned in the variable 'result' if 'options result' has been set in ARexx. This can be used to detect when a search fails by checking for the string "something not found". There are several extra CygnusEd Professional commands that are only accessible from the ARexx interface. All of the ARexx commands are listed below, in alphabetical order. Page 86 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11.4.2 Special ARexx Functions BACKSPACE: This command is the same as pressing the backspace key. CEDTOFRONT: This command brings the CygnusEd Professional screen and window to the front and activates the window. DELETE: This command is the same as pressing the delete key. DOWN: This command is the same as pressing the down arrow key. GETFILENAME: This command allows you to use the CygnusEd Professional file requester. It brings up the CygnusEd Professional file requester and lets the user select a file name. If you put a file name after the command name then that file name will be the default, it will appear in the file requester when it first pops up. Note: CygnusEd Professional will not return any results unless you first turn on "results". This is done with the ARexx command 'options results'. After this command has been executed, any results returned by CygnusEd Professional will be in the 'result' variable. Example: options results getfilename 'sys:s/startup-sequence' say 'File name selected was' result GETNUMBER: This command allows you to use the CygnusEd Professional getnumber requester. It brings up the CygnusEd Professional getnumber requester and lets the user enter a number. If you put a number after the command name then that number will be the default, it will appear in the getnumber requester when it first pops up. Note: CygnusEd Professional will not return any results unless you first turn on "results". This is done with the ARexx command 'options results'. After this command has been executed, any results returned by CygnusEd Professional will be in the result variable. Example: options results getnumber 25 say 'The number the user selected was' result Page 87 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- GETSTRING: This command allows you to use the CygnusEd Professional getstring requester. It brings up the CygnusEd Professional getstring requester and lets the user enter some text. If you put some text after the command name then that text will be the default text, it will appear in the getstring requester when it first pops up. Note: CygnusEd Professional will not return any results unless you first turn on "results". This is done with the ARexx command 'options results'. After this command has been executed, any results returned by CygnusEd Professional will be in the result variable. Example: options results getstring 'Default string' say 'The string selected was' result JUMPTO: This command is an extension to the "jump to line" command in the menus. The jumpto command lets you specify a column number as well as a line number. For instance: jumpto 15 233 This command moves the cursor to column 15, line 233. LEFT: This command is the same as pressing the left arrow key. MENU: This command lets you execute specific menu commands by specifying the menu, item and subitem number of the command. All numbers go from 0 to the number of items. This command is described more fully above. The example below will set the tab size to four. menu 2 1 3 OKAY1: This command lets you use the CygnusEd Professional information requester, called okay1 because it brings up a requester with just one gadget. You must specify the text you want printed in the requester. If you want the text to appear on multiple lines, separate the lines with line feeds (ascii value 10). For example: okay 1 'Testing the okay1 function' '0A'X 'Note the line feed' Page 88 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- OKAY2: This command is very similar to the okay1 command. The only difference is that the requester brought up by this command has two gadgets on it. The user can then respond to this requester with either a yes or a no. If results have been turned on (see the getnumber command) then a 1 or a zero will be returned, for yes and no. options results okay2 'Do you want anything more?' say 'This users answer was' result RAWKEY: This command allows you to simulate the typing of any key on the keyboard. This command takes two parameters. The first one is the rawkey code of the key to be pressed, the second one is the qualifier. For a list of the values to be used for the code and qualifier, please consult the AmigaDos manual or the Rom Kernel Manual. Note that this command should not actually be needed, since all CygnusEd Professional commands can be accessed without it. The example below is equivalent to pressing the down arrow key, and can be accessed more easily with the "down" command. rawkey 77 0 STATUS: This command is the most complex of all the ARexx/CygnusEd Professional commands. This command allows you to find out the value of over seventy of CygnusEd Professional's internal variables. Before using this command it is important to turn on results with the command "option results". After this command has been executed, any results returned by CygnusEd Professional will be in the result variable. "Status" takes one parameter, the number of the variable you want information on. Valid numbers currently range from 1 to 67. A list of what is returned for various numbers is presented below. Some of the variables whose values are returned hold a true or false value. For instance, in the screen height menu, interlace can be either on or off, true or false. This is returned by the status command as 1 (true) or 0 (false). Those that return true or false values have a question mark after them in the table below. Page 89 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of the numbers returned, such as cursor position, range from zero upwards, instead of from one upwards as they are displayed in the status line. Some of the values returned are global. That is, they are the same no matter which file is active. The screen height and width are global. Some of the values are specific to a particular file. The size and location of the file are file specific. Some of the values are specific to a particular view. The cursor position is specific to a particular view. The file and view specific variables returned are those that apply to the currently active view. 1 Interlace? 2 Hot start enabled? 3 Force custom screen? 4 Icon creation? 5 Custom height? 6 Custom width? 7 This returns a string which shows the actual positions of all of the tab stops. A capital 'T' is put where the tab stops are and '-'s are placed where tab stops are not. 8 Tab size. 9 Word wrap? 10 Scroll jump? 11 Layout mode? 12 Insert mode? 13 Tabs = spaces? 14 Right border. 15 This returns the actual address of the file in memory. Do not abuse this information. Directly modifying the file in memory is definitely not safe. 16 This returns the current size of the active file. 17 The number of lines in the active file. 18 The number of changes made to the active file. Page 90 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19 The complete path name and file name of the active file. 20 The directory name of the current file. 21 The file name, and directory, of the current file. 22 The number of windows onto the current file. 23-25 These three values contain the line number stored in the three marks, settable with the 'mark location' command. 26 This variable holds the line number of the automark. For information on when this mark is set, please see the commands summary portion of the manual. 27-29 These three values contain the column number stored in the three marks, settable with the 'mark location' command. 30 This variable holds the column number of the auto-mark. 31 Tabs visible? 32 Spaces visible? 33 EOL's visible? 34 Escape codes visible? 35 Status line on? 36 This is how many columns from the left edge of the screen the left scroll border is. 37 This is how many columns from the right edge of the screen the right scroll border is. 38 This is how many rows from the top edge of the window the top scroll border is. 39 This is how many rows from the bottom edge of the window the bottom scroll border is. 40 Left scroll bar? 41 Status line type. This is 0 or 1. 42 Column number of leftmost displayed column (usually zero). 43 Line number of topmost displayed line. Page 91 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 44 Cursor x postion relative to first displayed character. 45 Cursor y position relative to first displayed character. 46 Cursor x position relative to the beginning of the line. 47 Cursor y position relative to the beginning of the file. 48 Pixel x location of the left edge of current window. 49 Pixel y location of the top edge of current window. 50 Number of columns displayable. 51 Number of lines displayable in the current window. 52 This is the column the cursor wants to be in, but may not actually be in if the current line is too short or if the middle of a tab character is in that column. 53 Width of the entire CygnusEd Professional window in pixels. 54 Height of the entire CygnusEd Professional window in pixels. 55 The contents of the line the cursor is on. This is a string whose length varies, depending on how long a line the cursor is on. 56 This returns the offset, in bytes, of the start of the current line from the beginning of the file. 57 Current line number. 58 Length of current line in memory. 59 Length of current line on screen. This may be different than the length of the current line in memory because tabs may take up extra space and escape codes may be hidden. Page 92 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The next six status numbers return the contents of various cut and paste buffers. Every time you cut a block, backspace delete a word (ALT backspace), delete a word (ALT delete), delete a line, backspace a character or delete a character, the deleted text is put into a buffer - a different buffer for each type of deletion. The block buffer can be huge. Beware of asking for the contents of this. You may get more than you asked for. 60 Contents of the block buffer. 61 Contents of the backspace word buffer. 62 Contents of the delete word buffer. 63 Contents of the delete line buffer. 64 Contents of the backspace buffer. 65 Contents of the delete buffer. 66 Total number of CygnusEd Professional window open. 67 Total number of CygnusEd Professional file open. 68 Right scroll bar? RIGHT: This command is the same as pressing the right arrow key. TEXT: This command takes as a parameter some text which will be inserted into the current file, just as if you typed it in. For example: text 'This is some text to be inserted in.' '0A'X The text is put in quotes to prevent ARexx from turning it all to capitals and the '0A'X at the end is ARexx's way of representing a line feed (end of line) character in hex. The line feed character can not simply be typed in like other characters because it as a control character and gets special treatment from ARexx. UP: This command is the same as pressing the up arrow key. 11.5 What Do The Error Numbers Mean? Most status information from CygnusEd Professional is returned inthe result variable. This includes such as information as "Not found" after a search command fails. However some errors are serious enough to warrant returning an error code. This error code is put into the rc variable and results do not have to be enabled for it to be printed. Page 93 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Error code 3: This error happens if you specify an invalid number to the status command. Any number smaller than one or larger than 68 will cause this error. Error code 5: This means that the command you specified could not be found. I.e., it was not a CygnusEd Professional ARexx command. Check the spelling, make sure the entire menus string was entered (if it was a menu command) and make sure you have used the ADDRESS command to let ARexx know where to look for the commands. If you try to send a command to ARexx from CygnusEd Professional and a message comes up saying "ARexx could not find the program you specified. This could mean the file doesn't exist, isn't in the current or REXX: directory, has the wrong file extension (.ced is the default) or doesn't have a comment in the first line. Error code 10: This error happens if you are executing an ARexx program from the editor and you close the last window and then try to execute more commands. Once the final window is closed, no more commands may be executed. Note that the CygnusEd Professional window doesn't actually close until the ARexx program has finished executing. 11.6 Sending Commands to CED From Other Languages Commands can be sent to CygnusEd Professional from other languages besides ARexx. Since the ARexx interface is implemented by passing messages and forth, all other languages should have no problems communicating. To send a message to CygnusEd Professional you should first allocate a CedMsg structure. The C language declaration for this structure is: struct CedMsg { struct Message cm_Node; LONG RFU1; LONG RFU2; LONG rm_Action; Page 94 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- LONG rm_Result1; LONG rm_Result2; char *cm_Args[16]; LONG RFU7; LONG RFU8; LONG RFU9; LONG RFU10; LONG RFU11; LONG RFU12; }: Only some of these fields are needed. The others are for use with ARexx only. The most important field is the cm_Args field or, to be more precise, cm_Args[0]. All commands to CygnusEd Professional are null terminated strings and a pointer to those strings is always put into cm_Args[0]. If you are merely interested in sending commands to CygnusEd Professional and don't care about getting results back you can ignore all of the other fields. The rm_Action field is a flag field. The only flag we are interested in is the RXFB_RESULT flag, which is bit 17 (counting from zero). When this bit is set, CygnusEd Professional will return results if appropriate. The commands that can cause CygnusEd Professional to return results (if this bit is set) are the status command, the okay1 command, the okay2 command, the getstring command, the getfilename command and any commands that cause an information requester (with one or two gadgets) to appear. The rm_Result1 field is used to return any error numbers to the driver program. The error numbers and their meanings are documented above. The rm_Result2 field is used to return results from CygnusEd Professional when the RXFB_RESULT flag is set in the rm_Action field and a result returning command is sent to CygnusEd Professional. If the result is a number (such as would be returned if you asked for the status of a flag such as the word wrap flag) then the number itself is in the rm_Result2 field. If the result is a string (such as the current line or the tab stops) then rm_Result2 is a pointer to a string, usually null terminated (if the contents of a block buffer is returned there may be other zeroes in the string). The length of the string is returned in the previous long word. It is your responsibility to free up the memory. The following routine will do that for you quite handily. FreeMyString(location) char *location; { long *RealLocation; if (!location) return; RealLocation = (long *)location; RealLocation--; FreeMem(RealLocation, *RealLocation); } Page 95 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To send a message to CygnusEd Professional you need to follow these steps. Put a pointer to your command string (all ascii, including any numbers) in cm_Args[0]. The cm_Node.mn_Node.ln_Type field should be filled with NT_MESSAGE, an Amiga constant. The cm_Node.mn_Length field should be filled with sizeof(struct CedMsg). The rm_Result2 field should be zeroed to make sure you don't mistakenly think that CygnusEd Professional has returned a result when it hasn't. If you want results then the rm_Action field should be set to 1 shifted left by RXFB_RESULT bits and should be zeroed otherwise. Now you need to do a FindPort() on "rexx_ced" to find out where to send the message to. You also need to do a CreatePort("MyPort", 0L) so you will have a return port. The address of this return port should be put into cm_Node.mn_ReplyPort. Now you can send the message. You then need to wait for a reply and then delete your reply port. The code below does all of this for you. Note this assumes that you want results and that you will delete any strings that are returned to you. #define RXFB_RESULT 17 BOOL SendCygnusEdMessageGetReply(thecommand) char *thecommand; { TheMessage.cm_Args[0] = thecommand; TheMessage.cm_Node.mn_Node.ln_Type = NT_MESSAGE; TheMessage.cm_Node.mn_Length = sizeof(struct CedMsg); TheMessage.rm_Action = 1L << RXFB_RESULT; /* We do want results. */ TheMessage.rm_Result2 = 0; /* clear out the last result. */ if (!(CedPort = FindPort("rexx_ced"))) return((BOOL)FALSE); if (!(MyPort = CreatePort("MyPort", 0L))) return((BOOL)FALSE); TheMessage.cm_Node.mn_ReplyPort = MyPort; PutMsg(CedPort, &TheMessage); WaitPort(MyPort); DeletePort(MyPort); return((BOOL)TRUE); } Page 96 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 97 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 98 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================= Chapter 12 TECHNICAL INFORMATION ========================= All text editors have limitations - CED tries to put them out of the reach of normal use. Here are some of the important limitations: Maximum document size: as much memory as you have Maximum number of views: ten Maximum line length: 1024 characters The characters interpreted as end-of-line (EOL) characters are the ASCII values: 0-8 and 10-13. The characters interpreted as white space characters are TAB (ASCII 9), SPACE (ASCII 32), and EOL characters. To force a space character that will not be stripped out by LAYOUT mode if on the end of line, and will not be considered a word separator, use ALT-SPACE. CED is designed to work with either PAL or NTSC monitors (or high-resolution cards when they become available). CED will use any keymap set using the standard SETMAP function. So if you prefer using a Dvorak keyboard or a german style keyboard - no problem. The CLI command: 1> SETMAP USA1 will set your keyboard to Dvorak. Remember that the SETMAP command must be done BEFORE CygnusEd Professional is run. Page 99 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- When a file is loaded, it is all loaded into memory at once. This has an obvious speed advantage when editing, but the drawback is that the file size cannot exceed available memory. Because the Amiga has a lot of memory this should not be a problem for most users. CED will automatically dissociate itself from the CLI it is run from. This means entering: 1> CED myfile will load CED and then return control immediately to the CLI - you do not need to 'RUN' it with the RUN command. You can also use EndCLI with CED still running and the CLI will be removed. However, if you want any DOS commands that you run from CygnusEd Professional (using the DOS/ARexx interface) to be able to use the CLI window for input and output you should specify -keepio on the command line. There are a few minor problems that may occur when you are using CygnusEd Professional that are not directly related to CygnusEd Professional, they merely occur because CygnusEd Professional lets you push your system to its limits. The first problem is a hardware problem that occurs with overscan screens. When an overscan screen is at a certain position the two columns of characters along the right edge may flicker and display the wrong information. This is a hardware problem and can be solved by using preferences of CTRL-SHIFT-LEFT ARROW to shift the screen one pixel to the left. The second problem happens occasionally if you have two interlaced screens and one non-interlaced screen all open at once. What happens is that when one of the interlaced screens comes to the front it is either non-interlaced (showing only the top half) or it is completely scrambled. At this point you can still escape by typing Left-AMIGA n to bring the WorkBench screen to the front and then dragging the WorkBench screen down a bit. If you click on the scrambled screen instead then your system will probably crash. Page 100 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================ Chapter 13 ED - THE CygnusEd Professional ACTIVATOR ============================================ The ED command provided on the disk is a small (1.5K) utility which will summon CED or pass additional files to CED. When CED is not running, ED (when run from the CLI) will run a copy of CED and pass CED its filename(s). For example: 1> ED myfile1 myfile2 will call up a new copy of CED and pass it "myfile1" and "myfile2" as two new files to load. When CED is running, ED will not run an additional copy of CED, but will pass the filename(s) to the existing CED. If CED is dormant (not on-screen, but waiting for a HOTKey), then ED will awaken it with the file(s) specified. If CED is active with one or more files already on-screen, then ED will open additional views with the extra files in them, but will leave the original views active. A special ED command line is the form: 1> ED myfile -STICKY Page 101 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The -STICKY option is valid only at the end of the command and only when exactly one filename is given. Normally, ED will pass the file name(s) to CED and return immediately, allowing other programs to run in the normal multitasking mode. The -STICKY option overrides this and will not release ED until the user quits out of the file specified (in this case, "myfile1"). This is designed to be used in command files where you want the execution of the batch file or command script to wait until the user has finished editing a particular file. ED will return (using the sticky option) when the user either quits out of the file, clears the file or loads a new file in over top of the old one. ED is very useful in command files. For example, a command file which assembles a program may produce an error file and return an error status when there are errors. The following script will automatically put the error file in the editor if errors are present: ; This batch file called WORKPROJ will continually run until ; the file PROJECT.ASM will assemble without any errors ; Asm >Project.err Project.asm -oproject.o If Error Ed Project.err -STICKY Execute Workproj Endif ; The Assembly worked - exit batch file Due to a limitation in the current release of ED, ED will not invoke CygnusEd Professional if ED was started from the WorkBench and CEDPro was not already running. However, invoking ED from the CLI will cause CEDPro to being running if it was not already either dormant or running. To run ED from the WorkBench, you can click on the file you want to edit, and then while holding the shift key down, double click on the ED icon. Alternatively you can use the SET ICON TOOL NAME menu option in CygnusEd Professional to set the default tool name to C:ED so that double clicking on the file name will run ED which will then pass the file name to an already running CygnusEd Professional. When ED runs CygnusEd Professional it looks for it under just the name 'CED'. If you call it E or CygnusEd Professional then ED will not be able to find it. However, ED will have no trouble finding CygnusEd Professional, by any name, if CygnusEd Professional is already in memory (either running or dormant). Page 102 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================== Chapter 14 RecoverCedFiles - DISASTER INSURANCE ======================================== Because the Amiga is a multitasking operating system, many users run several programs at one time. Unfortunately, the Amiga architecture does not provide secure error trapping in all cases. This produces the famed "Guru Meditation" error. When a program produces this error, all other programs (including CED) will stop. You then have to reboot the computer. When a machines "crashes" this way, all the data is considered lost. If you were making changes to a file in CED and did not save the file before the crash, then those changes are lost. Fortunately, we have provided a helpful utility program called RecoverCEDFiles. This program will scan all the memory trying to find the CED files as they were in memory when the system crashed. When it finds each file, it will report which file it found, the size and the number of changes that were made since the last time it was saved. If you want to save the file, you can specify the filename to save it under using the standard file requester. Page 103 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- After a system crash, all memory is returned to a "free memory pool". This means that the memory that was being used by the CED file buffers is no longer protected. Because of this, the memory may become polluted or the file may be lost entirely. To be sure to be able to recover the files after a system crash, run RecoverCEDFiles as soon as possible after you reboot the computer. To improve your chances of safely recovering the files, halt your startup sequence by typing CTRL-D and then run RecoverCEDFiles IMMEDIATELY! WARNING: It is possible that a file in memory may have been damaged, perhaps completely wiped out, during a crash. If this happens, RecoverCEDFiles may still recover the file, and let you save it to disk. However, what it is recovering may be garbage. It is VERY important that you save any recovered files to a temporary file name and that you verify that the file is intact before copying it over your previous copy. To run RecoverCEDFiles from the CLI, just enter: 1> RECOVERCEDFILES To run RecoverCEDFiles from the workbench, double click on its icon. RecoverCEDFiles does take a few seconds to run. About one second for every megabyte of memory you have. While it is searching memory it locks out all other tasks, including Intuition. This means that your mouse pointer freezes while it is looking. DON'T PANIC. This is normal and should only last a few seconds. Page 104 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================== Chapter 15 TECHNICAL SUPPORT SERVICES ============================== 15.1 Technical Support Should you run into any problems with the supplied disk or manual or have questions pertaining to the operation of CygnusEd Professional contact: ASDG Incorporated 925 Stewart Street Madison, Wisconsin 53713 (608) 273-6585 If you are reporting a problem with the editor software, please provide a description of what functions you where doing when the problem appeared. Please provide as many details as possible - this will greatly aid our software team in correcting the problem quickly. 15.2 Network Support ASDG staff is available to answer your questions and assist you in solving problems relating to CygnusEd Professional on three major computer networks. Page 105 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. The Byte Information eXchange 2. Compuserve 3. UseNet On BIX and Compuserve, ASDG support is rendered in formal support areas. On BIX type join asdg The formal support group on Compuserve is still in the process of being set up at the time of this writing. Support on UseNet is informal. Page 106 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The End.