[Pythoncard-users] PyCrust key bindings and usage

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

Patrick is busy with real work, so consider this temporary documentation for
the Shell (PyCrust) in PythonCard until Patrick comes up for air in a couple
of weeks.

Key bindings:
Home              go to the beginning of the line
Shift+Home        select to the beginning of the line
Shift+End         select to the end of the line
End               go to the end of the line
Ctrl+C            Copy
Ctrl+Shift+C      Copy with prompts
Ctrl+X            Cut
Ctrl+V            Paste
Ctrl+up arrow     Retrieve Previous History item
Alt+P             Retrieve Previous History item
Ctrl+down arrow   Retrieve Next History item
Alt+N             Retrieve Next History item
F8                command-completion of History item
    type a few characters of a previous command and then press F8

The arrow keys navigate up, down, left and right just like a text editor.

The Alt key combinations cause my system to beep.

Typing the period key '.' after a name causes the auto-complete popup menu
to appear. You can then use the up and down arrow keys and mouse to navigate
the menu. Typing letters will do an incremental search through the menu, so
you can often just type the first few characters of an attribute or method
name to jump to the correct item of a long menu. Pressing tab will cause the
currently selected menu item to be inserted after the period. Clicking
outside the menu or pressing the Esc key causes the auto-complete menu to
disappear.

Typing an open parens '(' after a function or method causes a tooltip popup
window to appear with the doc string (if available) for that function or
method. For example, when I do this:

>>> temp = ""
>>> temp.index(

I get the doc string for the index method:
"S.index(sub [,start [,end]]) -> int

Like S.find() but raise ValueError when the substring is not found."

Most of the PythonCard framework is missing doc strings right now, but that
will change as the API settles down. The one exception is the BitmapTurtle
class which is setup and ready to use from the shell if you run the turtle
sample. The tooltips are extremely useful for the Python Standard Library.

Copy with prompts means that the prefix lines will be copied in addition to
the text of the line(s). In general, you'll only need to do Ctrl+Shift+C
when you are doing example documentation such as the two lines below.

>>> bg = pcapp.getCurrentBackground()
>>> comp = bg.components


You can edit functions and other compound statements in the shell as well as
retrieve the compound statements via the command history. This is somewhat
difficult to describe, so just experiment. The one thing you definitely need
to be careful of when editing lines is to go to the end of the end (pressing
the End key is the quickest way) before pressing Return or Enter. Otherwise,
the remainder of the line will be put on the following line and you'll
probably have to backspace up to where you pressed return.

ka