7. The Built-in Editor

The built-in editor of TkDesk is meant to be a simple ASCII editor for editing files smaller than, say, 500kB. A single editor window can handle an arbitrary number of buffers each of which contains another file. Files can either be loaded through the "File" menu of the editor or by simply dropping one or more files on the text field of the editor window from one of the file listboxes.

An editor window contains the following menus in its menu bar:

File

Contains entries to load, save, and print files, and to close the current buffer, current window, or all windows.

Edit

The first entry provides access to the editor's "Undo" functionality. Note that the undo buffer may contain a maximum of 500 events. This menu also contains entries for managing TkDesk's own text clipboard. Also provides entries to search for text (regular expressions), replace text, or find the next occurence of the currently selected text. The entry "HyperSearch" is a special form of search: all matching lines are displayed in a file listbox. If one of its entries is clicked on, the editor automatically displays that line at the top of the text field. This can be useful for jumping to headings, function definitions etc. Oh yes, and the regular expressions entered here are also saved with the other histories.

Options

The "Auto Indent" option determines whether the cursor is automatically indented after hitting Return. If the "Send to Netscape" option is set, the current file will be loaded by (maybe a running) Netscape each time it is saved. Useful when editing HTML files.

Buffers

Lists the buffers of the editor window. Buffers can be selected from this menu.

Configuration

This menu is only available when editing one of TkDesk's configuration files. It lets you save the file and reload it into TkDesk by selecting the corresponding menu entry or pressing F5, or exactly the same plus closing the buffer by invoking the next entry or pressing F6. This way configuration files can be edited and reloaded very quickly into TkDesk.

The text area provides all the more common Motif- and Emacs-like key-bindings (including Control-Space for selecting an area of the text). Maybe it should be mentioned that Control-C/X/V do not work on the X selection but on TkDesk's own clipboard. Use the middle mouse button to paste from the X selection into TkDesk or from TkDesk into another application.

7.1 Marks

Marks can be set with Control-[1-9], and be jumped to with Alt/Meta-[1-9]. You can always jump back with Control-0. They work across buffer and editor window boundaries, and are currently only valid as long as the buffer in which the mark was set is open.