accessed from the title bar of any text window.

If 'showRowCol' is on, both of the popup menus can be



mark in any window.

The 'gotoMark' function still allows you to go to any

of all currently defined marks in the current window.

Clicking while depressing the command key pops up a menu



'sortedIsDefault' var reverses these semantics.

the methods menu is sorted alphanumerically. The

'control' key. If the 'shift' key is depressed as well,

clicking in a text window while holding down the

the definition of that function. The menu is called by

Selecting an item from this menu immediately displays



may need to play with the definition for 'funcExpr'.

is very different than mine. If this is the case, you

to pick up all function definitions if your coding style

above, using regular expressions this way is not going

function definitions in the current file. As noted

string variable 'funcExpr' to create a popup menu of all

Alpha also uses the regular expression defined by the






Popup Function Menus





chosen.

corresponding end of the buffer (beginning or end) is

If no match of the bound expressions occurs, the



LaTex.

'AlphaBits' file for the regular expressions used for

paragraph, as opposed to the above default case. See the

case, what we are searching for is actually part of the

backslash to be the first line of a paragraph. In this

In LaTex, we would like a line beginning with a

Things become more complicated, for instance with LaTex.



consisting of only spaces and tabs.

These values assume paragraphs are delimited by lines



     "\r[ \t]*"



and the corresponding 'paraEnd' is:



     "[ \t].*\r"



default 'paraBegin' value:

determination to be customized. The following is the

While a little convoluted, this method allows paragraph



selects the line of the first character matched.

searching for the last line of a paragraph, Alpha

selects the line of the last character matched. When

When searching for the first line of a paragraph, Alpha



from the string variables 'paraBegin' and 'paraEnd'.

the current position. The pattern searched for is drawn

regular expression searches forward and backward from

The boundaries of the paragraphs are determined by

Alpha has several routines which manipulate paragraphs.





identified.

Pascal procedures w/ or w/o parameters can be

line, the last word in the line is used. Therefore,

the function's name. If there is no '(' in the selected

word previous to the first '(' in the selected line as

bear in mind is that the tag routines use the complete

tags for other languages. The only thing you need to

of 'C' declarations, you could also use it to generate

Note that not only can you customize this to your style



be a set of parenthesis.

other than '\t', '#', '\r', '/', ' ', or '@'. There must

take up an entire line. It must begin with a character

wade through it. The string that we are looking for must

complicated, this expression makes sense if you slowly

'?' after the last right parenthesis.) Although

method definitions. To pick them up, add a question mark

(NOTE: the above expressions won't pick up many C++



              ^[^ \t#\r/@][^\r]*\([^\r]*\)$



C function declarations:

currently uses the following regular expression to find

can change " funcExpr" to suit your own style. Alpha

the text. If you declare your functions differently, you

function declarations. In other words, we don't parse

expression in the string variable "funcExpr" to look for

ALPHA's tag generating routines use the regular

tag file specified by the "tagFile" string variable.

functions. When searching for a tag, ALPHA looks for the

ALPHA supports the use of tags to find declarations of



they the following section shows how useful they can be.

Regular expressions can be very difficult to master, but





              (aa|bb)box



'aabox' or 'bbbox':

The following regular expression will match either


EXAMPLE:



the matched text.

parenthesis that includes the nth left paren is denoted

substitution. The substring delimited by the pair of

matched string that can be used either later during

The parenthesis also define substrings of the total



can be concatenated to create larger expressions.

Regular expressions constructed from the above elements



 (...)    The interior elements are grouped together.

          matches either 'pete' or 'bob'.

          expressions is limited. Ex: (pete|bob)

          parenthesis, the extent of the alternated

 a|b      matches either a or b. If enclosed in

          pattern. Ex: 'ab?' matches 'a' or 'ab'.

 ?        zero or one occurrences of the previous

          pattern.

 +        one or more occurrences of the previous

          'abbb' etc.

          pattern. Ex: 'ab*' matches 'a', 'ab', 'abb',

 *        zero or more occurrences of the previous

 \r       carriage return or line break.

 \t       tab.

          by putting it immediately after the '^'.

          the enclosed characters. ']' can be included

 [^...]   negated character class, matches anything but

          'c', '0', '1', or '2'.

          enclosed choices. Ex: '[ac0-2]' matches 'a',

          inside classes. Matches one character of the

 [...]    character class, can use ranges such as '0-9'.

 .        any character except carriage return.

 $        end of line.

 ^        beginning of line.

 c        literal char.



from the following elements:

regular expressions. Regular expressions are constructed

ALPHA can now search for patterns constructed from full






Using Regular Expressions