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Text File | 1993-02-10 | 25KB | 513 lines

pE - The "perfect" Editor(tm) Copyright (c) 1990-1993 by Just Excellent Software, Inc. These notes are addendum to the printed pE manual. Release 3.02 - February 9, 1993 ------------ Menu Key Alt + Shift will access the menu immediately. Shift + F1 will also access the menu immediately. The menu can also be gotten to by pressing ALT and holding for approximately 1 second. Once the menu comes up you can press the first key of the options F, E, S, W, O or H. You can adjust the amount of time you must hold the alt key down with the command line option /m:d where d is the delaytime in seconds. (whole numbers only). A delay time of 0 causes the menu to come up instantly, but prevents you from using the Alt key commands. Please note that the environment variable PED can be set so that pE will always use whatever command line variables are set therin. For example SET PED=C:\PE /m:2 placed in autoexec.bat tells pe that its home directory is c:\pe and that it is to use a menu delay time of 2 seconds (default is 1). See the docs for other command line choices. Setting a large delay time (like 10 seconds) effectively turns off this capability. Control Menu pE now has a control menu like WINDOWS. Pressing Alt + Spacebar (or clicking what used to be the close gadget), will pull the control menu down. Control menus belong to windows, so each window has one. The menu choices in the control menu are: ■ Move - will move the current window (but only if there's somewhere to move it. ■ Size - sizes the current window. ■ Minimize - reduces window to minimum size ■ Maximize - makes window as large as possible ■ Close - closes the window. ■ Switch to - the same as the Jump List command. (switches to another window). Minimize & Maximize Two new commands, minimize and maximize were added to make it very easy to control window size. The advantage to minimizing a window is that the a significant amount of memory is made available. Zoom will toggle the state of a window size when it is small or large. Sizing a window to its maximum size set's 'both' sizes of a window to max. Stack(Windows) - new option under Window menu. StackWindows will stack all windows to their minimum (or maximum) sizes. It is a toggle. It is assigned to the F12 key. Those of you who have the old style keyboards will have to assign it to some other key. ASCII chart The ASCII chart was completely redone to be more useful and easier to read. Calling up the chart will pop up a window with a line devoted to each of 255 (out of 256) ASCII characters. (0 - nul, is not present). The highlight is placed on the last character it was on when you first called the ASCII chart up. (The first time its starts at 1, the control character A (). By using the arrow and page keys, you can position to any character you wish. Of course, you can also position with the mouse. Once you have selected the character you wish to use, pressing ENTER causes that character to be entered into the last window at the row and col the cursor was on. Pressing ENTER again will enter the character again. ESCaping from the ASCII window will close it. So will the normal window close (alt-k) command. When the ASCII window is closed (by any means), the character under the highlight is assigned to LASTASCII, which I have defined to be the (`) backward apostrophe (tilde?). Anyway, subsequent to the ASCII chart making this assignment, each press of the ` key will get you whatever ASCII character was assigned. If you regularly have use for that key, then I suggest you assign the command LastAscii to some other key. The ASCII window will insert a character into the window defined just before it, only when it is "active". It is active when the border is double and the title ASCII is the same color as the background of the window. If a column block is defined (and visible) in the window before the ASCII chart is selected, the character selected from the ASCII chart is used to fill the block. You are prompted for permission to fill the block first. If you select FillBlock (^K-F), the ASCII chart pops up to provide you with the entire range of ASCII characters to choose from. The window the ASCII chart is in does not participate in stacking (up or down) or cascading, but can be individually minimized, maximized or sized. There isn't much point in making it wider, although making it higher will allow you to see more characters at once. Note that the F2 key will leave the ASCII chart open and advance to the 'next' window. If only two windows are open, the F2 key will shift the focus from one to the other. Zoom Gadgets The zoom gadget has been reworked to only appear if there are two defined sizes of a window. The zoom character is an arrow pointing either up or down. If it points up, when clicked the window will get bigger. If it points down, when clicked, the window will get smaller. Release 3.01 - January 11, 1993 ------------ Announcing pEp I am pleased to announce the availability of pE - Professional. pEp is the protected mode version of pE. This means that it can use all the memory in your computer. It also means that under Windows 3.1 (in enhanced mode) it will virtualize memory to 16MB (presuming you have sufficient disk). Registering pE allows you to purchase pEp at a discounted price. pEp will not be available through normal shareware channels, but only to registered pE users! You must have a 80286 (or better) with > 1 meg of memory to run pEp. You may evaluate a copy of pEp by filling in the registration form and mailing it in with a check or money order for $5 (+shipping). Registering pE will allow you to request a demo copy of pEp for no additional charge. Previous pE registrants may upgrade their versions of pE to the current version and purchase pEp for an upgrade price of $29 (+shipping). Tab Key in Hex mode The Tab key now toggles back between the ASCII portion and HEX portion of a HEX display. Back Tab will go from ASCII to HEX as well. The cursor is a block in HEX mode. ToggleDecHex New command, ToggleDecHex, allows the offsets along the first column of the hex display to go from hexadecimal to decimal. While in decimal mode, you can jump to any decimal offset within the file. Who likes doing hexadecimal arithmetic, anyway? I've assigned Shift F9 as the key. Scroll Bar The scroll bar has been changed to work like everyone else's. (almost). I couldn't resist putting some gadgets in the status line which work like my old scroll bar did. The double arrow means that if you click with the left button the window scrolls one way, with the right button it scrolls the other way. The beauty of these gadgets are that if you get rid of the borders, you still have a way to scroll and zoom with the mouse. While the top scroll gadget (and now bottom) work with the left mouse button the way you would expect, the opposite action will occur if you click with the opposite mouse button. If you press the left button on the top gadget, the file scroll up (the arrow point up), if you press the left button on the bottom gadget the file scrolls down. The right button depressed on either of these gadgets reverses the action of the left button. Clicking left anywhere above the "thumb" will cause a page up, below the thumb a page down. If you hold the mouse button down, you will continue to page the file in the direction started until you release the button. It's much easier to use than to explain. Time Display The time now displays in the right hand corner of the menu bar. It is visible any time the menubar is visible. If you pay attention to it, you will notice that the colon flashes once a second. Count of Files The number of files and directories in the current chooser window is displayed in the lower right portion of the chooser border. Version 2.87 ------------ Added a "Start Up" command. StartUp is a macro always executed when pE starts up. It will only be executed if no file specification is provided on the command line. It will only be executed if it is assigned to a macro, and that macro is saved in env.ped. It may only be assigned to a single key stroke (no multiple key assignments). example: - on start up you would like pe to start having two windows, with the active one being the first created. start pe .... pe enter ^F1 (record macro) enter Alt-W {OpenWindow} enter F2 {NextWindow} enter ^F1 (end recording) press Alt-F10 - (that's the key I have assigned to StartUp) press Enter Now you can try the macro by pressing Alt-F10. If it works the way you want (it should if you're in window one) then you need to save your environment (^F2). When you save env.ped with ^F2, you are prompted with "local or master" environment. Pressing l(ocal) means that this (these) macro will be present only in the env.ped file in the current directory, while pressing m(aster) means that anywhere you start pe that does NOT have a env.ped file will activate the start up macro. I welcome any feedback regarding the usefulness of this feature. By the way, to disable a start up macro, Unassign it with ^- (unassign macro). Don't forget to resave env.ped. Added SAVE as a menu option. Menu now displays the current key assignment in status line, as opposed to always displaying the original assignment alongside the menu item. Added support for different date and time formats according to where COUNTRY is pointing to in config.sys. Changed format of ^d_d (date) to display "August 15, 1992" when country is US. See your DOS manual under COUNTRY for more explanation. Added line numbers as an option in the print menu. By turning to "on" you can print line numbers on your listings without affecting your file. Of course you can position to any line number with F9 (GOTO). Fixed a bug that prevented two copies of pE from being opened in Windows 3.1 (without a <very> ugly message. Release 2.86 - May 3, 1992 ------------ I have decided to eliminate the calculator from the pE executable and to go back to the un-overlayed version of pE. Many of you have written to tell me the reason you liked pE to start with was its size and quickness. Well, its back to its svelte size and its as fast as ever. The calculator is a separate executable and is shelled to when invoked. You need about 60k of free memory to be able to shell to it. Fixed a bug which left a funny looking window on the screen. It didn't do any harm, but it sure looked funny. Happened or not depending on what tsr's you had loaded and whether you asked for a new filespec from the chooser. Changed the drag feature to make it easier to drag stuff around. Just click the left button in the marked area and hold it after you mark a column block. As you move the mouse, the block will move. I'd love some feedback. Do you like it more, or less. I'll guess I'll know from the number of you who register, Huh? Little known command line switch. /vn where n is a number. The default for n is 20. /v varies the mouse scroll delay. If you want a faster scroll rate when you scroll using the mouse then reduce this number (all the way to 0, if you want). If you want the scroll rate slower, increase it beyond 20. The number, n, corresponds to the milliseconds of delay between mouse interrupts being accepted. This feature has been present since very early releases, but was never documented very well. The chooser now displays the file specification in the lower left corner of the screen. A specific chooser help file has been added when F1 is pressed. The mouse may be used to click on the bottom line (in the chooser) with varying results (depending where you click). Release 2.85 - February 21, 1992 ------------ When the last window is closed, you are prompted if you wish to exit the editor. If you answer no, the file chooser is now automatically called. There now exists a delay function capable of pausing a macro for a specified number of milliseconds (up to 999). It executes only from within a macro. Key assignment is Alt-/. To use it, embed the command in a macro and immediately follow with a 3 digit number (right justified) specifying the number of milliseconds to delay before executing the next keystroke. This command (named Delay) is useful for automating scripts. ToggleMacro now works correctly when issued in the getline routine. Windows will cascade with Alt-c, tile with Alt-t. F1 key now accesses commands. Alt-y is reassigned to DefineTag. Significant memory allocation changes. When pE runs out of memory, it releases its help buffers. This frees up enough memory to finish most editing commands. Obviously, you won't be able to use the F1 command under these circumstances, but everything else will work. You should try to close a window or write a file out to free memory. If you continue to edit and pE tries again to get more memory, it will tell you when there is insufficient room. At that point, you should write your file(s) out. Incorporated calculator into pE executable. Overlayed a number of functions resulting in more memory available even with the calculator! Added RegularExp toggle. Instead of pressing shift alt F or R to toggle regular expressions on and off, just press Alt-F5. Of course you can assign it to whatever key you wish. Release 2.84 - January 27, 1992 ------------ Hanging Indents (or outdents) now work correctly in word processing mode. A hanging indent looks like this: 1. This is an example of an outdent or hanging indent, it is arrived at by setting the indent to a negative number. For best results use word mode tab stops (ie increments of 5. This paragraph has an indent of -5. The chooser was modified a little bit to dynamically pick the number of ranks as a function of how many files are in the directory specified by filespec. There is a command line switch (/r) which controls the number or 'ranks' or columns of filenames that appear in the file chooser. Prior to this the default was always 3. The problem was that if you're in a directory with lots of files, most are hidden from you until you scroll. Now pE will maximize how many files it displays. If you don't like this for some reason, then set /r to the number of ranks (columns) you wish to see. You may do this by SET ped=c:\pe /r3 in your autoexec.bat. Of course you may set most of pE's command line switches in this way. Release 2.83 - January 4, 1992 ------------ Happy New Year! Two new commands - FillBlock (^kf) and LastAscii (`). FillBlock will do just that. A currently marked block is filled with a character you specify. Fill Block uses as a default fill character 'LastAscii' (see below). When the prompt 'Fill Character[ ]:' appears, type any ascii character. Characters having values > 127 can be entered using Alt + the numeric keypad. Alternatively, a legitimate response to the prompt is ^v_a (or Alt-f1) which opens the ASCII chart. Positioning the cursor on the character of choice and pressing ENTER than uses that character as the fill character. Note: Line blocks will fill out to whatever the current line max may be (default is 511, max is 1023). Stream blocks replace characters in the stream with the fill character (not past the end of the line). Column blocks work as you would expect. If you fill a block with the wrong character, you can undo with Alt-0 (alt 0). LastAscii - When the Ascii Chart is invoked, the character under the cursor when the chart is closed is assigned to LastAscii. This allows you to key the special character repeatedly without having to define a macro or key ALT number, number, number. If the Ascii Chart is never called then the value of Last Ascii is itself. Of course it can also be assigned to itself. LastAscii is assigned to the tilde (`). Note: The ascii value 0 (null) is not assigned to LastAscii as it causes a filled line to be truncated from the first character in which it is inserted. Instead, a space character is substituted. It is the author's opinion that the result will be what you really meant more often than not. (Of course, the author has been proven wrong from time to time). The Ascii Chart was changed a little bit to look better. Hitting ENTER, NEXT_WINDOW (F2) or ESC when the Ascii Chart is active will close it. AsciiChart has been assigned to Alt-f1 in addition to ^v_a. Replace string in block replaced all but the last column of a column block when all was selected. Fixed. Release 2.82 - December 28, 1991 ------------ Tab increment can be set to 0, signifying do NOT expand tabs on input. Five bugs exterminated. - Under certain circumstances pE would 'forget' you changed the contents of a window. A subsequent Alt-x (exit) or Alt-q would then NOT save the changes. I'm very happy to report that its fixed - Thanks, Jacque Eisenberg. - On systems that used COMMAND.COM as a shell (probably most of you) the cursor disappeared on shelling to DOS. Mouse cursor would also disappear if a mouse sensitive program was executed while 'shelled' out. Fixed! - Pasting a stream block into the last line of a file did not work correctly. Does now. - Doing a double space (^kn) at the end of a file caused video writes to cease. Now it correctly ignores the command. - Pressing shift 7 while in graphics mode now correctly produces ▌▌▌▌▌▌. pE now works correctly on NOVELL networks. You must set SHOW DOTS=ON in your shell.cfg file. Prior releases of pE worked correctly except for the file chooser. The problem has been corrected. Changed grey* so that line(s) must be marked before it will do a copy to scrap. This allows you to use the grey * as an asterisk, except when you have a marked block (in which case you probably don't need to press an asterisk. Of course, the asterisk above the eight is an asterisk all the time. Made the Alt-cursor keys (the grey ones on a 102 key keypad) scroll up, down, left and right. This works like the shift cursor keys did before I added stream blocking. Added the ability to define cursor size. The function can be accessed either from the 'options' menu or through the command menu. Heres how it works: On color monitors the cursor occupies a 8 scan line cell. The 'normal' cursor is defined as line 6 and 7, counting 0 from the top and 7 as the bottom. So a cursor defined as 6,7 means the bottom two scan lines will be the cursor. On a monochrome monitor (and adapter) the character cell is 14 scan lines and the 'normal' cursor is defined as 12,13. pE now allows you to set the cursor to any size you choose and when you save options, the cursor size is saved. Be careful to make starting scan line smaller than ending scan line. You will probably 'lose' the hardware cursor entirely. Release 2.81 - November 26, 1991 ------------ Turning Borders off now frees the top line as well. Top of Page and Bottom of Page leave the cursor in the current column (instead of moving it to column one). Bug that turned stream blocks on when wordwrap occurred while shifting, fixed. Release 2.80 - November 14, 1991 ------------ A new program, offered to registered users only, is described in "ORDER.FRM". To read about it, place the cursor on the line above this one and press Alt I. - Go ahead, try it! F2 will get you back. Two new commands. Copy to Scrap and Append to Scrap allow you to copy or append marked lines to the 'scrap'. The default assignment is grey* and ^grey*, respectively. You may also continue to copy marked lines to another location in the current file (or any other file in any window) without affecting the 'scrap' by simply moving the cursor to where you would like the copy to occur and pressing 'paste' (grey+). Neither copy to scrap or append to scrap is destructive in any way. NOTE that the previous content of the scrap is REPLACED with copy and ADDED to with append. The shift arrows now extend a block. They used to scroll. Use Scroll Lock to 'lock' the screen to scroll. Shift key + a cursor key, when a block is not already defined, will begin marking a stream block. If a block is already defined, then it will extend the mark according to the block type defined. To end marking a block, you must either execute a block command (like cut, align, boxdraw, etc), or type any block mark command (ALT_L (lines), ALT_B (rectangular block) or ^K_k for stream block. Note that if you mark using a stream mark in column one, you get the same effect as a line mark, in that each preceding line is entirely marked. Once the extend has begun, you no longer need to hold down the shift key.