Chapter 5 - Advanced Editing

Overview

MSS HTML Editor has many advanced edit features. You have the special edit feature called marks, which works pretty much like selections but are much more flexible. There are also several other advanced commands in the 'Advanced' sub menu under the 'Edit' menu.

Marks

A mark can be described as a saved selection. You can mark parts in your document by selecting them and then press the 'Mark Selection' toolbar button. You can use edit features on marks instead of the selection. To do so, press the 'Use Marks' toolbar button and most edit features will be applied to marks instead of the selection. Exceptions from this are the features located in the 'Advanced' sub menu of the 'Edit' menu.

So, why should I use marks, you ask? The fine thing about them is that you can define an "unlimited" amount of them. Lets say you want to apply some feature to multiple parts of your document. You could select each part one by one and apply the same thing millions of times, but a smarter way would be to mark all the parts, and then apply the things you need once.

Marks can also be defined using the Find/Replace tool. You can for example mark all occurencies of a word by using the Find tool and then right click on it and select 'Mark All' from the popup menu. For more information about this see the section about the Find/Replace tool below.

Advanced Edit Tools

In the 'Advanced' sub menu of the 'Edit' menu there are several useful edit commands. Those are:
  • 'Upper Case'
  • 'Lower Case'
  • 'Smart Case'
  • 'Smart Tabs'
'Upper Case' and 'Lower Case' converts the current selection to upper or lower case notation. 'Smart Case' tries to apply the right case to every character. For example starts each sentence with an upper case character. 'Smart Tabs' inserts tabs in the document to highlight the structure of the code.

Find/Replace Tool

The Find/Replace tool has been moved to the sidebar for easier access. You can still bring it up by pressing 'Ctrl + F' or by selecting it from the 'Edit' menu, though. When you first look at it you might be a bit confused, it doesn't look like it usually does, but as you will see it isn't hard to work with and has some advantages over a regular system.

To find something just type a word into the text box at the top and press 'Enter'. The program will find the first occurence of the word you typed and display it in the tree control below. To find the next occurence, press 'F3'. You can bring up a popup menu by right clicking in the tree control. Here you can do lots of intresting things like:

  • 'Goto'
  • 'Replace'
  • 'Mark'
  • 'Find All'
  • 'Replace All'
  • 'Mark All'
  • 'Remove Search'
You can goto an occurence by double-clicking it. If the program crashes when you do this, download the new version which addresses this problem.

Previous Chapter Index Next Chapter