From: Peter G. <pe...@ar...> - 2003-06-12 20:00:40
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This morning's development snapshot is up (j 0.19.0.7, lisp 0.0.0.39): http://armedbear.org/j.zip (source and documentation) http://armedbear.org/j-jar.zip (just j.jar) Unlike its predecessor (0.19.0.6), this snapshot is NOT a release candidate for 0.20.0. Having added a bit of XML mode functionality in the current development cycle, I thought it would be nice to have a special "XML" menu in XML mode. Adding this menu was clearly a safe, no-brainer kind of task that would in no way jeopardize the stability of the release candidate, yes indeedy. So I added a new menu in XML mode and called it "XML". Imagine my surprise when I noticed that Alt X didn't drop down the new menu, as I expected, but instead invoked executeCommand, just as it has since the beginning of time. This was a bit discouraging, since up to that very moment I hadn't thought of that issue at all. I had envisioned a grand scheme involving mode-specific menus in all modes, with names like "Java" and "Perl", and now it was clear that doing it that way would kill off all the Alt key mappings (or vice versa). Emacs gets around this problem by eschewing a normal keyboard interface to its menu system. I considered this approach, but came to my senses in time. Eventually I hit upon a plan: make a new menu called "Mode", in all modes. This kills off the Alt M mapping, but that's just one mapping, for all modes, and it's nowhere near as crucial a mapping as Alt X. In the long run, it's likely that the right thing to do is to get rid of the Alt key mappings entirely, which would free up the menu system to do whatever it wants. But that's a huge change, and I'm still waiting for a comprehensive and consistent set of key bindings across all modes, with or without Alt key mappings... In any case, there's now a "Mode" menu in all modes. In many modes, all you'll get is a single grayed-out item ("This menu isn't here yet!"). If you encounter that situation, you might ask yourself what you were expecting to find there, and if you find that you have a specific answer to that question, let me know and we'll see what we can do. XML mode has a real "Mode" menu, and when I was thinking about what to put on it, it occurred to me that xmlInsertTag should really be called xmlInsertElement. I haven't actually made that change yet, but the corresponding menu item is called "Insert Element", and I changed the command's dialog to prompt for "Element:" rather than "Tag:". (This dialog is also used in HTML mode, where "Tag:" might actually be more appropriate, so maybe there's little sorting out left to do...) The "End Current Element" menu item on the XML "Mode" menu corresponds to xmlInsertMatchingEndTag, which might also be a candidate for a name change at some point. Directory mode has a "Mode" menu too, with a few items moved there from other menus. In the spirit of minimizing the number of Alt key mappings, dirCopyFile and dirMoveFile are now mapped by default to 'c' and 'm', respectively, instead of Alt C and Alt M. Taken as a whole, these changes are substantial enough that the code should get a few days of rest now before being considered release- candidate-worthy. I don't think anything serious is broken, but a little bit of cleanup is still in order, and it would be nice to have real "Mode" menus for more modes. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. Suggestions about what should go on the new mode-specific menus are particularly welcome. Thanks for your support. -Peter |