Re: [rox-users] Questions about and suggestions for Edit

[Ken H. <ke...@ha...>]

Mike Hobbs wrote:
> On the whole Edit is very useful (nice and simple - avoids the annoyance 
> of all the
> 'helpful' features in so many editors), but I have some questions and 
> suggestions...
> 
> *  Somehow an edit window started operating in overwrite mode.  I don't 
> know what
>   I accidentally pressed and despite trying all control key combinations I
>   could not find a way of changing back to insert mode. I would be nice 
> to know
>   how to switch modes.

The Insert key.  This is very standard for this type of thing.

> *  There appear to be a number of undocumented control keypresses. It would
>   be really nice if keys could be user-mapped to useful actions (so that I
>   can make it act like RISC OS Edit).  It would be really useful if 
> Ctrl-Up and
>   Ctrl-Down move to top and bottom of document like RISC OS.

The behavior for the most part is standard GTK and is the same for almost every GTK edit field.  I'm 
not sure how you would change these, but I'm guessing there is a way...probably gtk-rc related.

Otherwise, we'd have to create menu items for each of these so that you could assign your own 
shortcut keys, or add a key-action manager or something like that.

> *  I've been doing a lot of python editing recently and I've really wanted
>   the ability to block indent or unindent a chunk of text.
>   This could be implemented several ways:
>   a. mark a chunk of text and indent/unindent it using a menu selection

Try tab, shift-tab.  Might only work with gtksourceview though.

>   b. mark a chunk and typed characters are inserted at the same column 
> on every
>      marked line.
>   Either would be acceptable but b would be more versatile.
> 
> *  When typing into a window and the caret gets to the last line then 
> when the
>   line wraps or return is pressed the caret goes out of sight. It should
>   cause the text to scroll up so that the user can see what he is typing.

Yeah, that is a bug I just recently encountered myself. Needs to be fixed.

> 
> *  I still can't get gtksourceview to work with Edit which is a shame 
> because I
>   expect it would be rather useful.
> 
> I'm using Edit release 2.0.
> 
> I've tried a number of other editors.  Oh boy, what a load of rubbish!  
> Many just
> crash, others have many features that don't work and options which are 
> randomly
> ignored.  Are there any equivalents of RISC OS Zap and StrongEd that 
> actually work?

Try SciTE?  Not sure about RISC OS equivalency, but a nice lightweight editor.