PDA Software Library/pdasoftwarelib.iso/HP95_100/UTILITY/PE/PE.ZIP/README

Text File | 1996-10-17 | 15.1 KB | 356 lines

PalEdit 1.1b
------------

PalEdit is a simple text editor written using PAL (Palmtop Application
Library). Its look and feel is very similar to the HP100LX/200LX
built-in Memo application.

PalEdit is copyrighted freeware provided by

                D&A Software Inc.
                Email: [e-mail]

Some highlights of PalEdit:

 - handles files of unlimited size
 - lines can be up to 32767 characters long
 - several files can be open at the same time
 - uses the SysMgr clipboard if SysMgr is running
 - uses its own clipboard if SysMgr is not running
 - supports all zoom modes of the HP palmtops
 - can edit binary files
 - supports incremental searches
 - supports search and replace
 - supports keyboard macros
 - can shell to DOS
 - is mostly keyboard-compatible with the EMACS editor
 - can directly start a compiler and take you to the locations
   where errors were found
 - is expandable using DOS filters
 - Can send and receive electronic mail using WWW/LX
 - Runs on the desktop in VGA mode using Harry Konstas' INF5F.

If you are familiar with the built-in Memo editor, you should not have
any difficulties to use PalEdit. Most keys behave almost the same way
as in Memo. Unlike Memo however, PalEdit is a simple text editor and
does not support formatted texts (boldface, underline, promote etc.).
Also, PalEdit does not directly support printing.

On the other hand, PalEdit is a much more powerful text editor than Memo.
PalEdit is usually much faster than Memo and is not limited in file
size, line size, the characters you can use etc.

If you are familiar with EMACS-style editors (EMACS is a wide-spread
UNIX editor), you will find that PalEdit also supports all commonly
used EMACS keystrokes.

If you get stuck in PalEdit or if you don't remember what keys to
press to accomplish a certain function, simply press F1 to open a text
file which explains the keystrokes that PalEdit understands.

If you familiar with other text editors, you will be used to most
commands of PalEdit. Some special features, however, are discussed in
the remainder of this text.


Files / running PalEdit:

The editor itself is PE.EXE. You can start it by typing "PE" on the DOS
command line or by typing something like "PE MYFILE.TXT", in which
case the file MYFILE.TXT is loaded into PalEdit. You can also specify
multiple files on the command line and use wild cards.

The file PE.HLP contains the help text for PalEdit that is shown when
you press F1. It must reside in the same directory as PE.EXE. Also
into the same directory you have to put PE.CFG, a file that determines
the configuration of PalEdit.

PalEdit needs at least 150k RAM. The more memory it gets, the faster it
runs.


Editing multiple files:

PalEdit can have several files open at the same time. This makes it
easy to quickly switch between different files and copy and paste text
from one file to another. To open a different file while a file is
still open, simply press F9 ("Open") and enter the name of the file
you want to edit. If you want to go back to the old file, press F7. If
you have several open files, this will cycle through all the open
files. If you have many files open, you might want to use Ctrl-X,
Ctrl-B instead of F7. This will display a menu of open files you can
choose from.

In the file open dialog, you can choose from a list of the last 10 files
you were editing. This is a fast way to pick a file - and this list is
saved (in C:\_DAT\PE.ENV) when you quit PalEdit.

If you are developing software with PAL, you can simply start PalEdit
with "PE @". This will open all the files specified in the SCRLIST
file in the current directory.


Margins and formatting:

Although PalEdit is not a word processor, it still supports some basic
formatting of the text, namely where lines are broken. There is a
right margin that you can set using the keys Menu T R. If this margin
is set to, say 72, and you keep on typing past column 72, the line
will automatically be broken. If you, on the other hand, set this
value to zero, the lines will be broken only when you hit ENTER. If
you want to change the position at which the lines are broken later
on, simply set the margin (using Menu T R) to the value you want, go
to the paragraph (i.e. the area between two empty lines) you want to
reformat and press Menu T F. This is especially handy if you want to
re-format a paragraph after you have added or deleted some words and
the paragraph looks ragged.


Tabs:

PalEdit supports tabulators in a slightly different way than most
other text editors do. To the user, it looks the same: pressing the
TAB key just goes to the next tabulator position. While most editors
insert a TAB character at that position, PalEdit inserts spaces
instead. This ensures that the text will look the same independent of
which viewer or editor you use to look at the text. If a text you load
into PalEdit already contains TAB characters, PalEdit will ask you if
they should be expanded to spaces. If you say "no", the TAB characters
will be maintained and display as small circles. The distance between
tab stops can be set in PE.CFG and defaults to 8.


Searching:

Searching for a text works as follows in most editors: you press a key
to open a dialog in which you enter the string you want to search for.
After you have entered the string, you press another key and tell the
editor that it should start searching now. PalEdit (and EMACS) work
much more efficiently: you press a key to tell the editor you want to
search for a string (F4 or Ctrl-S) and then you start typing the
string you are looking for. While you are typing, PalEdit already
searches for the string and displays to you the next occurence of the
string you typed so far.

This kind of searching is faster in two ways: you don't need to type
that much because the searched text may already be found when you
typed fewer keys than you expected. And PalEdit already searches while
you are still typing and not only after you have completed typing and
press (yet another!) key to tell you have finished typing.

While in search-mode, you can hit F4 (or Ctrl-S) again to
find the next occurence of the string you have entered up to now. Or you
can press Shift-F4 (or Ctrl-R) to search for the previous occurence. A
typo can be corrected by using the Backspace key.

If you plan to replace the string you have found (or all these
strings) with a different string, press F5 after the first occurence
is found. Then enter the string with which the found text should be
replaced. PalEdit will then take you to all occurences of the string
and ask you to confirm the replacement. You can also replace all
occurencies with one keystroke.


PE.CFG:

There are several features in PalEdit that you can configure. Some of
them you can access from the Options menu, and all of them you can
specify in the file PE.CFG, which must reside in the same directory as
PE.EXE. PalEdit reads this file when it starts and sets all parameters
according to the settings found there. Have a look at PE.CFG. It
contains short explanations for what the parameters are about.

In PE.CFG, you can assign macros to keys by adding entries in the
[Macros] section of PE.CFG. Each macro definition starts with the scan
code of the key you assign to the macro, followed by an equal sign
('='), followed by the scan codes of the keys that should be pressed.
An example:

 #1e00=#7700#5032#7500   This assigns a macro to ALT-A (#1e00). If
ALT-A is pressed, the following keys will be pressed for you: #7700 is
Ctrl-Home, #5032 is Shift-Down and #7500 is Ctrl-End. This sequence
will mark the whole text. To find out the scan code of a key, press
ESC-K and then the key, PalEdit inserts the scan code of that key
(without the "#") at the current cursor position. In the [Labels]
section of PE.CFG, you can assign labels for the macros to any of the
unused function keys (e.g. F2 or F3). Example:

 2 = Hello

assign the key label "Hello" to F2. Make sure these labels are not
longer than 7 characters.


PalEdit for programming:

There are a some features in PalEdit that may be especially interesting
for programmers:

If auto-indent is enabled and you press ENTER, the cursor is positioned
in the first column of the next line that lies below the first
non-space character of the current line.

It is sometimes difficult to keep track of parentheses, brackets etc.
PalEdit supports you with that: when the cursor is positioned on one
of the characters that typically come in pairs and you press ESC
followed by TAB, PalEdit will put the cursor onto the matching
parenthesis, bracket, etc.

PalEdit supports keyboard macros for repetitive key sequences: press
Ctrl-X (, then press the sequence of keys, and finally press Ctrl-X ).
After that, the key sequence is stored and you can replay it with
Ctrl-X E. If you want to repeat it, say 20 times, press Ctrl-U 20
Ctrl-X E.

Note that the Ctrl-U <number> feature works for most other keys
too, not just for macros.


Integrating PalEdit with a compiler:

If you are developing software using PalEdit, you can directly call the
compiler from PalEdit. When compilation is done and errors are reported,
PalEdit takes you to the location of these errors. In order to do that,
you have to set up your compiler and PalEdit as follows: the result of
the compilation has to be stored in a file named "SCRATCH". If you use,
for example, the PalMake utility PM, you should remove the ">$(/err)"
parts from PM.CFG and let PM write the errors to the screen. Then add
the line "Compiler = PM >SCRATCH" to the [File] section of PE.CFG. This
instructs PalEdit how to start the compiler. If you now press Ctrl-XC,
PalEdit will execute "PM >SCRATCH", i.e. it will run PM and redirect the
output of PM to the file SCRATCH. As soon as PM is done, PalEdit
displays the contents of the SCRATCH file. If there were no errors, you
are done. If there were errors, simply press Ctrl-XG. This will take
you to the file and location of the first error found in SCRATCH. If you
later press Ctrl-XG again, it will take you to the next error (no need
to go back to the file SCRATCH, BTW).

Note: In order for Ctrl-XG (goto next error) to work, the errors in the
SCRATCH file must have the following format (TCC, for example, produces
this format): each line containing an error message or warning must
start with the string "Error " or "Warning ", then continue with a file
name, then a space and the line number and, finally, the error message.


Filters:

You can expand the capabilities of PalEdit by using so called filters.
A filter is an external program that can take a chunk of text from
PalEdit, process it and return the result to PalEdit. Let's look at an
example. Let's assume the following line is found in the [Filter]
section of PE.CFG:

   Indent 3 = sed -e "s/^/   /g" <%s >SCRATCH

This line generates an entry in a menu that you can pop up by pressing
Ctrl-XR. The entry will show "Indent 3". When you select that entry,
and you have a piece of text selected, PalEdit will store that piece of
text in a temporary file (let's assume its name is xxx) and call the
DOS command

   sed -e "s/^/   /g" <xxx >SCRATCH

As you see, the "%s" is now replaced by the actual file name "xxx". SED
is a program that can take a stream of characters and perform some
editing operations on it. In the current example, it would insert three
spaces at the beginning of each line from file xxx. The result is
written to a file named "SCRATCH". When SED has finished, PalEdit will
cut the original selection and replace it by the contents of the file
named SCRATCH (the name of that file is fixed; each filter has to write
to a file named SCRATCH).

If no selection is active, PalEdit will use the whole file as input to
the command. It will then not replace the file by the output of the
command, but open and display the file SCRATCH.

If the string "@@" is found in the command, PalEdit will prompt the
user for input and replace "@@" by what the user typed. For example,

   dir @@ >SCRATCH

will ask the user for input. If the user types "C:\_DAT", the command

   dir C:\_DAT >SCRATCH

is executed.

If the command returns line numbers (e.g. "grep" with the -n option,
Ctrl-XG will take you to the the line number that is indicated on the
line the cursor is currently standing on. This is similar to what
Ctrl-XG does after compilation.


Electronic Mail:

Together with WWW/LX, available from D&A Software Inc., PalEdit is able
to send email to the Internet and receive email from the Internet. In
order to send email to the Internet, you have to add the following line
(modified appropriately) to the [Mail] section of PalEdit:

   SMTP=my.smtp.server

where "my.smtp.server" has to be the name of a  host that can accept
email in SMTP format. Also, you need to specify your email address so
that the system can find out who sent the message:

   From=my_name@my_machine.my_domain

In order to receive email, you need to add a line such as:

   POP=my.pop.server

where "my.pop.server" is the name of a host that can deliver mail to
you using the POP protocol. You also need to specify a name of a file
that should get the incoming mail:

   MailFile=C:\_DAT\MY_MAIL.TXT

If the login name and the password to access the POP server is the same
that you need to access your ISP, PalEdit will automatically use these
values. If they are not the same, add the line

   Manual_POP_Login=1

If you want to use PalEdit to answer to "mailto" links from within HV,
you need to specify the following line in the [Services] section of
HV.CFG:

   mailto=pe -m %s %s

If "PE" is not on your DOS path, you need to specify the full path and
file name for PalEdit.

When PalEdit is set up to send and receive mail, you will see an
additional item in the main menu bar: "Mail". If you want to send the
currently displayed text as email, choose Menu Mail Send as Email.
PalEdit will ask you for missing header fields and, if all headers are
OK, send off the email message. In order to receive email, choose Menu
Mail Get Email. PalEdit will connect to the POP server and retrieve
waiting email. It will store it (append it) to the file you specified
with "MailFile" and display you that file. "Get Email" will not delete
the messages on the POP server, so if you do another "Get Email", you
will retrieve the same messages again. In order to delete the messages,
use "Get/Delete Email".

Of course, this all works only if WWW/LX is already loaded in memory.
The simplest way to start WWW/LX and PalEdit together is:

   WWW -d !pe

provided PE is on the DOS path. Otherwise, you need to specify the full
path. The -d tells WWW/LX not to establish the connection before you
actually want to send or retrieve email. You can close the connection
at any time from within PalEdit using Menu Mail Disconnect WWW/LX.

If you start PalEdit with "pe -e", it will directly take you to the
mail file. In order to add that option to the startup command for
WWW/LX, use:

   WWW -d "!pe -e"


---

Andreas Garzotto, September 1996

(written using PalEdit - of course :-)