Ved includes an enormously useful facility to expand part of a command
with some text related to the current file.
As explained in
HELP vedexpand
this depends on the variable vedexpandchar having a character as its
value. E.g. if you do:
`^` -> vedexpandchar;
Then the following abbreviations become available in the command line:
^w EXPANDS TO word at cursor position in current file
^l EXPANDS TO the current line
^f EXPANDS TO a filename read from the current line
^e EXPANDS TO characters from cursor to end of line
^% EXPANDS TO VEDPATHNAME (full name of current file)
^p EXPANDS TO SYS_FNAME_PATH(VEDPATHNAME)
(i.e. directory part of current file name)
^# EXPANDS TO path name of next file on VEDBUFFERLIST
^^ EXPANDS TO ^ (!)
(needed for when ^ is followed by one of the above and
the expansion is not intended.)
The help file shows how this can be customised to change those rules or
add new ones.
All of this is not available by default when you start up Ved because
vedexpand is set false. For many years I have not noticed this since
I've been setting it to `^` in my vedinit.p file.
I am now trying (again) to find out what it is like to be a naive
user without the benefit of my private customisations and there are
many things I don't like including the fact that those abbreviations
do not work.
I am inclined to make them work by default. I find ^w particularly
useful, i.e. for commands using the word to the right of the Ved cursor.
However this will require people who intend to use "^" followed
by one of the recognized characters to use "^^"
Is that likely to cause confusion: how often is a novice likely to
want to use Ved commands containing any of the above abbreviations?
Incidentally I have also found a host of problems with key bindings:
e.g. Xved assumes that keypad keys have keysyms like KP_8 and KP_4
which don't work, whereas KP_Up and KP_Left do.
In order to make it easier for beginners, I'll change the roles of Del
and Backspace to conform to what most people are now used to, alas,
(i.e. veddotdelete and vedchardelete instead of the other way round).
Experts can always reset this in vedinit.p
I'll change the default interpretations of keys F1 to F12 in XVed to be
consistent with what people using the Bham packages are used to, i.e.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/help/xtermkeys
Except that XVed grabs F10 to covert the menus to key-board operation,
which is useful, and I'll make keypad 5 scroll ved to bring the current
line to the middle of the window (at present it does nothing).
I would like to make ESC followed by something invoke vedjoinline()
which joins the current line with the previous line, wherever the
cursor is, and ignoring vedbreak. (Currently you have to press a delete
character key at the beginning of a line, and if vedbreak is true, no
more of the current line can be appended to the previous line than
will fit into vedlinemax.
I have been using Esc Del for this for some time, but for some reason
XVed refuses to accept this:
vedset keys
vedjoinline = esc (Delete)
....
endvedset
Maybe something else is overwriting it.
I'll shortly make available some changed files that people can try out
by rebuilding saved images.
Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/ (And free book on Philosophy of AI)
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
|