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Uedit-Tutor
Copyright (C) 1986-92, Rick Stiles
((See Uedit-Policy for purchasing info.))
**** DISCLAIMER ****
I can accept no responsibility, if you crash your Amiga or lose text files
with Uedit. No guarantees, either explicit or implied, are made as to
Uedit's safety. If you use it, it is at your own risk.
**** ********** ****
Dear folks,
(See Getting Started, below, for immediate instructions.)
Uedit is an editor for technical users. It has many wordprocessing features.
In developing and enhancing Uedit, the aims have been for the user to:
o Be able to work without bumping into limits of power and capacity
o Be able to automate repetitive work, eliminate tedium, save time
o Be rid of the irritation of wasted keystrokes and stodgy performance
o Be able to customize the environment fully
o Be able to create, on the spot, new capabilities that are needed
Uedit is Shareware. You can get a copy from a friend or off a computer
network and try it out, in order to decide whether to purchase the full
package or not. (See Uedit-Policy for purchasing info.)
What's missing? This freely distributable (UES) version of Uedit has only
one limitation: It has a 4-file limit. I hope that if you get beyond the
trying-out stage and actually use it, you will take the time to register.
About Uedit
You can try Uedit immediately without reading beyond this paragraph. The
menus, HyperText Help, and Teach Mode should be enough for most users to get
going.
When you use Teach Mode, be sure to try the shift/alt/ctrl/Amiga shift keys,
to find out what the various combinations do with the keys and mouse-clicks
and gadgets in the message line. Abort out of Teach Mode with Amiga-ESC.
Goals in writing Uedit were openness, flexibility, power, friendliness -
above all to give you Freedom of Choice.
Being able to edit 100 files (or more, using the stacks) is only the
beginning of the depth Uedit has got.
Learn Mode adds a new dimension, providing instant automation for people who
hate reading instructions and only want to know enough to get the job done.
The command language adds another dimension, letting you rewrite Every
command, even the gadget and mouse button commands - on the fly. Example:
Put the cursor anywhere before the following command and press F6.
<normal-esc: putMsg("Welcome to Uedit!")
alertUser("Click me") >
Now press Esc.
Then there is the overall configurability and customizability, being able to
swap and kill keys, change colors, customize the menus, etc.
Then there is the ability to switch configurations, changing the personality
of Uedit in seconds, without interrupting editing.
Then there is the fact that it sleeps so that other tasks run efficiently and
can start other tasks and load in their results so that you can use them.
The ARexx interface allows you to send commands or text to Uedit from CLI or
to and from host programs.
The "infinite" buffer and number stacks let you edit as many files or hold
onto as many buffers or numbers as memory will hold.
Spooled file saving and spooled printing continue while you are editing or
when Uedit is in tiny window.
You can click the title bar and go to tiny window even during an operation,
and the operation continues while in tiny window.
The spell-checking feature allows you to spell-check documents, build
dictionaries, create and use dictionary supplements, and so on.
Features
There are too many features to go into here. To name just a few:
It has on-line Help as well as Teach Mode that teaches the purpose of keys,
gadgets, clicks, and menu selections. (To get a list of all keys that move
the cursor, select Apropos and type "cursor".)
It has split windows, colored (hilite and invert) regions, interlace screen
and RGB color tuning, mouse-scrolling, cursor-placement and hiliting, full
sets of cut/copy/paste/clear capabilities for scratch, inverted, or hilited
as well as columnar text.
It has paragraph reformatting, page-making commands, printer selection and
controls, undo-deletes, (global and optionally incremental) search-replace,
edit-while-you-print up to 12 documents or regions, ctrl-click-loading of any
filename anywhere, an ARexx interface, and much more.
New commands can be typed into any buffer. They are compiled in a fraction
of a second typically, when you put the cursor in front of them and press f6.
The command development and debugging environment is extremely fast. New
commands can be tested immediately after they have been written or changed.
The main reason the features can't be listed is that you can create new ones
anytime. Many (probably most) of the ideas for improving Uedit have come
from users.
Ignore the Technical Aspects
Experience has shown that most Uedit users are technical, even though the
program was always meant for everyone to use. If you aren't technical or
don't want to take time right now, try it like you would any editor or
wordprocessor. Ignore anything that sounds technical or tedious.
For instance, learn mode couldn't be simpler to use. It offers benefits that
rival the command language and overall customizability of the program.
(To start learning, press Ctl-s. Give any series of inputs. Press Ctl-r to
stop the learning. Press Ctl-r again to run the series of steps.)
And remember: Almost anything you don't like can be changed by the user.
Getting Started
Workbench and CLI:
You can run Uedit immediately in Workbench by clicking its icon.
You can run it immediately in CLI by typing "Run UE file1 file2 file3 etc".
To be able to run UE from any directory, run CLI and type the following:
Copy UE C:
Copy NoName.info S:
Copy Data! S:
Copy Help! S:
Copy Key-Help S:
Copy Help-Key S:
Copy HyperSample S:Hyper/Files
Copy HyperSample.tbl S:Hyper/Tables
And if you've got the disk space,
Copy Config!#? S:
Now you can run Uedit from any directory. NoName.info must be in S:, if you
are going to select Make Icons so that Uedit will create file icons. (You
can supply a custom NoName.info icon, of course.)
Data! and Help! must either be in S: or in your current working directory.
Here is what the key-prefixes mean in the menu selections: S=Shift, A=Alt,
C=Ctrl, L=leftAmiga, R=rightAmiga. Keypad keys are abbreviated with "kp".
If a menu selection says "L-0", it means pressing left Amiga key and "0" will
do the same thing as the menu entry. If it says "SA-kp7", it means press
Shift and Alt along with the 7 on the keypad.
Press Help or use HyperText as needed. Start HyperText by pressing rAmiga
and clicking the left mouse button. Select Teach Keys to learn about Uedit's
keys. When finished with Teach Keys, press Amiga-ESC. (HyperSample and
HyperSample.tbl must copied to S: as shown above.)
Amiga-ESC is the general purpose Abort key. Use it to Abort any operation.
To slide Uedit's screen up/down, put the mouse at the very top of the title
bar.
CLI command line:
The "Run UE" command line can have any number of file names in it, up to the
maximum that you are configured to use.
The following flags can be used in the CLI command line as well. The flags
must come before the file names in the command line. Example:
Run UE -a0x0f0f0f0f -b12345678 -lMyLearnSeq -k300 -dDataFileName
-cConfigFileName -sStateFile file1 file2 file3 ....
-a and -b initialize the global variables UserGlobalA and UserGlobalB. -s
causes the StateFile to be loaded in. -l causes the learned sequence to be
run after the files in the command line (or StateFile) are loaded in. -k
causes the key with the corresponding macro-number to be executed - after the
files (if any) are loaded, and after the learned sequence (if any) is run.
The flags are handled in the following order:
-c load config file and compile it (default file is Config!)
-d load data file, if -c wasn't used (default file is Data!)
-a and -b set the global user variables
Load files, if any
-s load state file (default file is UeState)
-l run the learned sequence
-k run the key
The function keys, F1 thru F10, do the following (with no shift keys):
F1 = next file
F2 = save file
F3 = close file
F4 = quit
F5 = swap next 2 commands
F6 = compile command following cursor
F7 = input search text and search fwd
F8 = input replace text
F9 = search fwd
F10 = replace & search fwd
Files and buffers: Uedit has 100 buffer for holding documents and bits and
pieces of text. The lowest buffer numbers are used for holding documents.
Any number of buffers may also be stored on the buffer stack. (The same is
true of the number stack and the file-saving queue.)
How many files Uedit will let you load in is determined by the Max Files menu
selection.
Directories and Files:
The easiest way to load a file is to Ctrl-click its name in Uedit. There are
two "current" directories:
One is the Current Directory in which the Uedit program is running. This
is the directory you started up in, unless you change it. (See AmigaDOS
menu.)
The second is the click-loading directory that Uedit currently is using.
The default click-loading directory is also the directory you started up
in, but you can change it as described below.
If you ctrl-click a directory name such as S: in any buffer, the directory
name is added to the list of directories in buffer 38. If you ctrl-click in
whitespace in any buffer, a split window opens up showing you the directory
list (buffer 38) with the current click-loading directory hilited.
In the split window (buffer 38), you can change the current directory, get a
dir listing, edit or save the directory buffer, get the current directory
(CD), or select a new click-loading directory.
You can also get a directory listing by selecting Directory in the menu. The
directory name you give is put into the directory list and becomes the
current click-loading directory. Or you can get a listing by running an
external List or Dir command using Dos+Result in the AmigaDOS submenu.
The Files menu lets you load/insert/rename/restore/save/close files.
Miscellaneous:
In the title bar are a series of lettered flags "tiokrwjmcabf" which are
local - that is, they applie only to the current file you are editing.
Select Local Modes or press shift-f5 to see what they mean. Clicking a flag
toggles it On or Off. If it is On, the letter is capitalized.
To make the 4 invisible "gadgets" in the message line visible or invisible,
or to change any of the global switches, select Global Modes or press Ctrl-g.
Scrolling: Scroll vertically by holding down the mouse button and moving the
mouse. The arrow keys also do vertical and horizontal scrolling. You an
also create a hilite region with the mouse by double-clicking and dragging
the mouse.
For for slower scrolls, either hold down the up/down arrow key or use Shift,
Alt, or Ctrl with the arrow key. Or use the up/down gadgets in the message
line.
Moving the Cursor: Most of the time you may prefer placing the cursor by
clicking the left mouse-button.
The keypad keys 2, 4, 6, & 8 move the cursor up/down/left/right by word/
character/line/page depending on which shift key is used.
(Teach Keys will give you the sense of the keypad keys.)
Scratch deletes & Undo:
Scratch deleting is what you'd normally use in meat & potatoes text work. The
following keys do scratch deletes at the cursor location:
Ctrl-d deletes the cursor line.
Keypad-7 (unshifted) deletes word-left.
Keypad-9 (unshifted) deletes word-right.
Shift-kp7 deletes character left.
Shift-kp9 deletes the character under the cursor.
Alt-kp7 deletes to start of line.
Alt-kp9 deletes to end of line.
Ctrl-kp7 deletes to top of window.
Ctrl-kp9 deletes to bottom of window.
These are the "scratch" delete keys. When you use them, the deleted material
is stored in the scratch-delete (Undo) buffer. Long as you don't move the
cursor and make a delete somewhere else, you can store any number of scratch
deletes.
Pressing keypad-0 inserts the Undo buffer at the cursor. Thus, after doing a
series of scratch deletes using the above keys, you can place the cursor
somewhere, press keypad-0, and insert the deleted material.
If you move the cursor and do another scratch delete, the Undo buffer is
cleared before the newly deleted text is stored. You should do most of your
cut & paste the quick & dirty way, with scratch-deletes and the Undo key.
If you select Undo Buffer in the Split Window menu, you can monitor the
contents of the Undo buffer and edit it.
To adjust the size of any split window, activate the window by clicking it
with the mouse and then press lAmiga-= and adjust the size by holding the
left mouse-button and moving the mouse. Up to 8 split windows are allowed.
There are many ways to do cut/copy/paste operations and to do them in
parallel:
You can be doing cut & paste using scratch deletes, hilite and invert
regions, and columnar data, all at the same time. If these aren't enough,
there are 100 buffers to put bits and pieces into. Any number of buffers can
be put onto the stack using Push Buf, so you can maintain as many files and
buffers as memory will hold.
Creating a hilite region:
There are 3 ways to mark a hilite region. Press HELP to see how.
But rather than do that, try this: Place the mouse high up in the text.
Hold down the Shift key and click the mouse.
Move the mouse to the lower right in the text. Hold down the Alt key and
click the mouse.
There should now be a hilited region. This is one method of hiliting.
Try this: Select Hilite Buf in the Split Window menu. This shows you the
contents of the copied hilite buffer.
Put the cursor anywhere in the colored, hilited region in the original buffer.
Now press keypad-Minus, the "-" key on the keypad. This "cuts" the hilited
region. The region disappears. (Don't move the cursor yet!)
Note that the cut material appeared instantly in the copied hilite buffer.
Now press keypad-Enter. This puts the "cut" text back where it was. And it
is hilited. To unhilite it, press alt-h or select Unhilite.
To get rid of a split window, click the mousebutton in it, making it the
active window-split. Then select Drop Split in the Split Window menu or
press lAmiga-0.
Columnar text:
Columnar regions are rectangular. This means that when you create a hilite
region to use for columnar text movement, the Start of the hilite region must
be in a Lefthand column and the End of the hilite region must be in a
Righthand column. No region exists if the end of the region is not in a
higher column number.
Place the mouse high up in the text and to the left. Press Shift and click
the mousebutton.
Place the mouse low down and to the right and press Alt and click the button.
Select Col Display in the Edits menu. Now the region should be displayed as
rectangular.
Select Col Copy in the Columnar menu or press Keypad Dot. This makes a copy
of the columnar region.
Put the cursor anywhere with the mouse. Select Col Insert in the Columnar
menu or press Keypad Enter and it inserts the copied columnar text.
To remove the inserted text, select Col Cut in the menu or press Keypad Minus.
Experiment with columnar text in order to understand how to manage it. (If
you altered this Uedit-Tutor file just now, select Restore in the Files Open
menu to restore it to the original.)
When using columnar display mode, TABS are shown as "box" characters. This is
so that columns line up correctly when spaces and TABS are intermingled, as
they often are. (If tab spacings had to have regular spacing, this wouldn't
be necessary, but tabs can have any desired spacing.)
Tab Rulers:
There are 5 tab tables in Uedit, numbered 0 to 4. You can change the tab
table your document is using by selecting Tab Table in the menu.
Individual documents can use different tab tables. The tab ruler shows the
tabs in the current document's tab table.
Select See Ruler to see what the tab columns are or select Set Ruler to set
the tab columns.
If you have selected Set Ruler and wish to set tabs at high columns beyond
the right edge of the window, hold the mouse-button down and drag the mouse
to the left, then release the button.
To slide the ruler to the right, drag the mouse rightward.
Tab columns can be set by clicking the mouse within 2 lines of the ruler, or
by using the keys that the help message says to.
Screens, colors, and RGB tuning:
The Lace/Planes submenu lets you select from 4 screens, which use 2 or 4
colors, regular or interlace. You can see the most lines of text by using
interlace. Scrolling with the mouse is fastest and the least memory is used
with a regular 2 color screen.
You can tune the RGB colors by selecting Tune RGB. Alt-Help lets you select
the colors for text, msg line, title bar, hilite, and so on. Each buffer can
use its own text colors. If you change the colors and want the menu colors
updated, select Do Menus.
Printing:
In the Printing menu, select Print Select and put in a number 0 to 3,
specifying where you want your printing to go. The message line tells you
what the numbers 0-3 mean:
0 = raw text out the parallel port
1 = raw text out the serial port
2 = processed text using the Amiga's printer device
3 = raw text using the Amiga's printer device
If you embed Uedit's printer control codes in your text (such as for boldface,
italics, etc) using the Bracket Hilite or Embed Code menu selections, you
should set "Print select" to 2 or 3.
If you embed your own custom printer codes in the text, then you can use
Print Select values 0, 1, or 3, and they will be sent to your printer in raw
form. (Print-select value 2 allows the printer device to eat control codes
that the Amiga printer device doesn't recognize.)
(To embed CTRL characters, such as ESC, press ctl-c and then the desired
character. To identify any control character in the text, put the cursor on
it and press ctl-/.)
Print queue: In the printing menu, you can select Print Hilite or Print
File. Long as the print-job will fit into memory, you can queue up as many
as 12 print-jobs and continue editing while they print.
You can queue up print jobs to different printers, by changing Print Select
before selecting Print Hilite or Print File for each print-job.
If the print-job is too big for memory, you must wait until printing is
finished before continuing editing.
Save on idle: Clicking the "a" (or "A") in the tile bar turns On or Off the
local flag for Save On Idle. Being local, it applies only to the current
file you are editing. When the current file has been modified and you pause
for 10 or more seconds, it is saved automatically. The pause-length can be
changed using Idle Timer in the Numbers menu.
Margins, line-length, and lines-per-page: In the Line/Page menu are
selections for lines/page, line-length, top/bottom margins, and end-of-line.
If you want an "inner" left margin temporarily, use autoindentation so that
succeeding lines stay at the same indentation. (The autoindentation setting
is changed using the "i" (or "I") flag in the title bar.
To control the right margin, set line-length to the desired value.
If you set Left Margin in the Line/Page menu to any value greater than 0,
typing uses the new left margin value. Also, reformatting paragraphs causes
them to be reformated at the left margin value.
Thus you can reformat an inset paragraph so that it is moved to the far left
by setting Left Margin to 1 and reformatting it.
Paragraph reformatting: To reformat a paragraph, put the cursor in the line
where you want reformatting to begin. Then select Paragraph in the Text
Reformats submenu or press ctl-3.
Paragraph reformatting ends when it reaches a blank line or a different
indentation.
Page formatting: See the Paging menu.
Pages are determined by formfeeds in the text or by the line-count, using the
current lines-per-page value. To set the lines/page, see the Line-Page menu.
The Page Formatting menu has selections for going to page#, going to top of
page, gding to bottom of page, inserting a page-division, deleting the next
page-division, and auto-inserting page-divisions in your entire document.
When a page-division is inserted, the page number is automatically put in.
You can erase the page number by selecting Del Page #.
Page numbers are put 1/2 the bottom margin distance from the bottom of the
page, where the bottom of the page is simply the lines/page setting (normally
66).
(Note that these are all user-customizable commands which you can modify
and recompile. Every command is customizable.)
When a page-division is inserted, the top margin for the next page is also put
in, after deleting any blank lines.
The formfeed causes the display to draw a line across the window, making page
divisions easy to spot.
You can find page divisions quickly by using the Bottom Page and Top Page
menu selections. (These are lAmiga-b and lAmiga-H.)
To insert a page-division and page number at the cursor, press lAmiga-v or
select Divide Page.
To remove a page division, put the cursor anywhere in the page above the page
division and press lAmiga-d or select Del Page Div.
Odds and Ends
To abort any operation, press Amiga-ESC.
Primitive Mode is used for special text and number inputs. The Title Bar and
the message line tell you what to do in Primitive Mode.
If you press F7 to input a search string, you'll be in Primitive Mode. Type
in the search text, then press ESC or click the mousebutton to terminate the
input.
In Primitive Mode, you can type in Ctrl characters (such as ctl-m for
carriage return) directly. No need to press ctl-c first.
You can change the Primitive Mode terminator character from ESC to some other
Ctrl character (such as the Return key) by selecting PM Terminator in the
menu or by pressing ESC.
You can search for two things at once by putting a "$" dollar sign between
two search strings. This is the eitherOr delimiter. To cause searching
to skip a particular pattern, use the "all-but" delimiter which is "~".
The "?" question mark is used by search as a single-character wildcard. The
"*" is used as a multi-character wildcard.
You can change these special characters by selecting Wildcards or Either-or
in the Settings menu.
To change the case-sensitivity of searching, select Global Modes or press
Ctl-g and click the SearchCaps flag.
In the message line are fake "gadgets" (if Mark gadgets is turned On), such
as "Next file", "Prev file", and so on.
These message-line gadgets are similar to keys and mouse clicks. They can be
swapped, killed, reprogrammed, learned, used in menu selections, and so on.
Gadgets can be used with shift-keys, so there can be up to 36 gadgets.
Menu selections are always usually attached to a key, gadget or mouse-button
command. If you swap a menu selection, the key you swapped it with is run
when you select that menu item. (See the Keys submenu.)
Bookmarks: The Shift-gadget commands allow you to place up to 8 bookmarks in
any buffer and goto the next or previous bookmark. Be sure to shift-click
the 4th (rightmost) gadget to initialize the bookmarks first, if you are
going to use the default bookmarks.
Grep: Uedit has an enhanced grep, in addition to the normal search & replace
capability. The grep commands are the following:
lAmiga-f7: set grep /search/replace/ string
lAmiga-f9: grep search forward
rAmiga-f9: grep search backward
lAmiga-f10: grep replace & search forward
rAmiga-f10: grep replace & search backward
More odds & ends:
Uedit sleeps when it can, so that other tasks will run faster.
Clicking the Title Bar switches to the tiny window. The tiny window comes
up inactive, so you can type into CLI immediately.
This also lets the Amiga reopen the big window in a better memory location.
If memory runs out and the "Memory..." message appears, that means Uedit is
compacting its stuff in memory, creating a larger contiguous free area. If
"Memory..." appears, you ought to save and close some documents. Also it's a
good idea to click the Title Bar and reopen Uedit's window.
Uedit sleeps between inputs. If you don't type anything for 4 seconds, it
does housekeeping. If you select "Busies", you'll see which buffer is being
worked on. When the housekeeping is done, it sleeps.
In the window's Title Bar, brackets [buf#,flags] contain the buffer number and
various flags. If Learn Mode is currently learning, "L#" appears, where #
is the number of steps in the learned sequence. If you are in Teach Mode,
"T" appears. (To get out of Teach Mode, press Amiga-ESC.) If documents are
queued up for printing, "P#" appears, where # is the number of print jobs yet
to be done, up to 12 maximum. If file-saves are in the queue, "S#" appears,
where # is the file-saves remaining.
You can change the font Uedit is using by selecting Set Font. First type in
the font name and press ESC; then type in the font size (usually 8). Uedit
speeds up the displaying of sized 8 and 11 fonts, such as Topaz 8, Clean 8,
and Topaz 11, but it will let you use any font.
Uedit works with all known hardware add-ons. Some people start Uedit in
their Workbench df0:S/Startup-Sequence and do everything from inside it.
They let it sleep in tiny window while they are working elsewhere.
To see the current settings for line-length, lines/page, tab-table, margins,
Uedit Serial Number, etc, press shift-HELP or select Show Vals. This also
shows you the size of the current file.
Some settings are global and others are local to the current file. The
global flag settings can be seen by selecting Global Modes (Ctl-g), and the
local flags are in the title bar; you can see a description of them by
selecting Local Modes (shift-f5).
Note that changing a local flag doesn't affect new files that are loaded in
later on. To change the Wordwrap setting for new files, for instance, click
the Wordwrap flag in the Global Modes (ctl-g) table of switches.
To recover the original configuration after fooling with commands, colors,
etc, select Load Data.
After making any of the changes discussed here, selecting Save Data saves all
current settings to the data file on disk.
Editing Tricks
If you are like me and hate reading instructions, and expect programs to be
Easy Without Reading, then Learn Mode is for you.
No reading is necessary. Learn Mode uses just the normal editing stuff.
It offers immense power and capacity to automate tedious, repetitive jobs.
If you need to search and replace misspelled names in 300 documents, you can
teach Learn Mode how to do one and let it do them all while you take a break.
To set up for such automation takes only as many seconds as it takes you to do
one operation yourself, showing Learn Mode what to do.
Simply press ctl-s to start Learn Mode, do the sequence of operations, and
press ctl-r to end Learn Mode. (If you press ctl-s a second time, it
aborts and wipes out the learned sequence.)
Then press ctl-r to see how it works. If you did it right and it works
right, press ctl-m to set the command multiplier and then press ctl-r to run
it as many times as desired.
Shift-alt-c is the Cycle Counter command: Follow it by any key that you want
repeated, such as ctl-r (run learned sequence) or f9 (search forward) and it
will run the key until it "fails" - assuming (and this is not always the
case) that the key's command returns a meaningful true or false. When an
execution fails, the number of successful runs is shown in the message line.
Thus you can count the words in a document by putting the cursor at start-of-
file and pressing SA-c followed by kp-6. Or count the lines by using kp-2
instead of kp-6. Or count the occurrences of a certain word by using f9.
(Note: If it runs forever, probably the iterated command is not returning a
False. So press Amiga-ESC to abort out of it.)
The Manual has lots of Examples and Editing Tricks showing how to take
advantage of Uedit's versatility and power. It describes how to use Learn
Mode to click-add numbers or click-bracket words, do a mail-merge, and so on.
A useful trick is to swap Run Learn (ctl-r) with the mouse's buttonUp
operation. (The menu selection Swap MouseUp lets you do this swap.)
Then when you click the button, buttonDown will deposit the cursor like it
normally does, and buttonUp will execute a learned sequence!
The learned sequence can be anything. It can, for instance, click-bracket
text with printer control codes. The Manual's Editing Tricks present such
examples.
Or you can swap the mouse's buttonUp operation with another key, such as the
add-numbers key (ctl-=). Just select Swap MouseUp and press ctl-=.
Then you can click-add numbers that are scattered in various documents. The
running total is shown in the title bar. Pressing ctl-\ will put the total
into the text at the cursor.
To unswap the command, select Swap Mouseup again and press the key you
swapped with originally (such as ctl-r or ctl-=)
Learned sequences can be stored on disk as files. They are stored in the
current directory. (This can be changed.) If you copy them to S:, Uedit
will find them from any directory. The Learn menu lets you start, terminate,
run, load, and save learned sequences.
A saved learn sequence might, for instance, go to top of document and type in
a header, or go to bottom of document and type your name and address. You
could save it to disk and select Load & Run in the Learn menu to run this
learned sequence anytime. Or you could assign a special key that inserts a
header in one keystroke:
<normal-esc: if (loadLearn("MyHeader")) runLearn >
Config! and Data!
Config! is a configuration file which is the source of every command Uedit
currently uses. (Except, of course, you can change anything while editing.)
A configuration may be of a number of files. The current standard config
consists of: Config! (defaults and menu selections) Config!H (hyper text,
grep, & bookmarks) Config!M (misc) Config!P (printing & paging) Config!R
(ARexx) Config!S (spelling & split windows) Config!Z (new or modified
commands - it may or may not exist)
Data! is a compiled copy of Config! which Uedit loads at startup.
Data! should be in your S: directory or current directory, along with Help!
and Key-Help. If Data! is in S:, you can run Uedit from any directory or
disk drive.
To make Uedit recompile the config file, in CLI type: Run Ue -c
The Config!(A-Z) have to be in your current directory or in S:.
You can keep as many config and data files on hand as you want. The Save
Data and Load Data menu selections let you switch configurations or save
changes to Uedit that you have made while editing.
You can load and save data files from/to any directory and under any name.
By customizing Uedit, you can turn it into an emulation of a favorite program
or a disk utility or even possibly a spreadsheet. While editing, you can
select Load Data and load in an entirely different configuration, changing
its appearance and behavior.
If you run Uedit by typing "Run UE -dDataFile .." or "Run UE -cConfigFile .."
in CLI, it will load DataFile or compile ConfigFile.
There can be hundreds of commands on-line at the same time. Keys can load,
compile, run, swap, and kill other keys, so there really is no limit to how
many commands can be available at the press of a key.
Also you can create Partial Data files which contain blocks of commands that
can be loaded in collectively or individually.
There can be up to 7 menus with up to 20 selections each with up to 12 submenu
selections, for a total of 1680 submenu selections.
The configurability of Uedit is extreme.
A directory utility configuration was written that, in some respects, is more
powerful and useful than directory utility programs typically are. It lets
you load in up to 100 or more directory listings and copy/delete/rename files
and directories. And while using it you can hold onto the files you were
editing before you switched over to the dir-util config, as well as load in
various files to read, edit, and save while in the midst of directory house-
cleaning. This dir-util config is available as an extra.
Kurt Wessels wrote a config called UStar that emulates WordStar. UStar is
available as an extra.
Eric Kennedy wrote a vi config that emulates the famous unix vi editor. Unix
users can feel right at home, using VI! instead of Uedit's standard
configuration. VI! is available as an extra.
Kent McPherson has written an edt configuration that emulates the famous EDT
Gold Key editor on DEC minicomputers.
Others have written specialized configs for programming and emulations of
popular programs. These are available as extras or from the authors or in
the public domain.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the many users who have given thoughtful feedback on Uedit
since it came out, or have uploaded it to networks for me at their expense,
or helped in other generous ways. Most of the improvements since V1.0 have
been due to their feedback, and Uedit's survival is due to the generous
assistance of many users. Used to be, I included a list here, but I simply
had to take it out. To name even one person or to try to name all who
deserve it is sure to leave out somebody who really helped a lot.
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Your feedback will be appreciated.