--------------------- | Kephra Feature List | --------------------- This is the best place to answer questions like : "Does Kephra...?" , "How to change...?" or "How do I...in Kephra?". Even if the main menu might do that in some cases faster. Even if the editor currently doesn't do everything we wish, he already has a big pile of features. If you're already familiar with text editors, you can skip a lot of the following and switch to the "Advanced Tour", also to be found in the help menu. But if you're interested in a complete and sorted (order as main menu) overview of all features, go on. The config keys refer to "config/general/autosaved.conf", the main config file. Content: 1 Navigation in text 2 Selecting text 3 Text editing (edit menu) 4 History of changes (edit menu) 5 Clipboard functions (edit menu) 6 Search menu and search dialog 7 Tools Menu 8 File menu 9 Document menu - Document settings 10 View menu 11 Config menu 11 Help menu 1 Navigation in text - move caret - direction keys move the textcursor(caret) through the text (as usual), and a left-click with the mouse can set the caret to this position. - moves the caret to the first non-whitespace character in the current row. Pressing again moves the caret to the first position. moves the caret to the end of the row. - + jumps to the first character of your text and + to the last. - The and keys move the caret page-wise up or down. Page means here the size of the visible part of the text. - + or let the editor turn to next or previous document. Next refers to the order that is shown in the tabbar. - + or an left-click an the current tab in tabbar turns to the last used document (switch back). - + let the caret jump to the start of the next or previous word. - + or scrolls the text line-wise up or down. - + or let the caret jump to the next or previous paragraph. Paragraphs are blocks of text, sparated by empty lines. - to jump directly to a specific row press + and enter the number - press ++<+> and +<-> to zoom your source/text 2 Selecting text - Holding or the left mouse button makes it possible to select text by moving the caret. The selected text will be marked. - To select a square of text (cols), hold down the key. This is also called rectangular selection. - To move a selected text with your mouse, hold down the left mouse button. It's also possible to move text with your arrow keys while you're holding +. In case there is no text marked, ++ or moves the current line. - When you hold down while you're moving text with your mouse, you instead make a copy of it. - + marks the whole text. 3 Text editing (edit menu) In most cases you do select a stripe of text, to make something with it and most text-modifying functions here expect that you selected some text before. In case you selected nothing the function will use the whole current document as input. If you add the -key to a hot key, its meaning will most likely reversed. - Any selected text will be deleted if you type ordinary character key. - The -Key toggles the caret form. An upright line let you insert text as you type(insert mode), a horizontal underline showes you that you currently overwriting the old text. - deletes the character on the right side of the caret. + erases the whole word. The key (<--) deletes the character on the left side of the caret, accordingly + deletes a word. - There are 3 groups of text editing functions and each has its own submenu in the "edit"-menu. Format stands for rearranging the text by inserting or removing spaces and linebreaks, but not changing the content. Comment means to insert or remove some character from the text to activate or deactivate the chosen content in the specific computer language. Convert filter can do change character and the content in a chosen way. - + indent the current line by inserting one space on leftmost position no matter where the caret is located. If there are several rows selected, the function will be applied to all rows, ++ provide a reverse funcion. - + (|<- ->|) does indenting in similar way, only with tabs. The size and type of these tabs depends on your settings. - Several more text editing functions can also accessed via menu like "Align Indention", "Join Lines", "Delete Trailing Spaces" and much more. 4 History of changes (edit menu) The editor does remember every change, so that you can always go backward and forward in the history of this text editing session. The only limit here is the memory of your computer. - + goes one step back and ++ one step forward. Please be aware of, that if you do change something in the "past" there will be no more steps forward. - When you have a long history it is sometimes handy to make several steps at once. + and ++ works this way. The number of overleaped steps can be set at the config key: "editpanel > history > fast_undo_steps". - It is also possible to sneak quickly where things started. ++ jumpes to the begin and +++ back to the latest state. 5 Clipboard functions (edit menu) Every newer desktop or operating system provides a clipboard to exchange text and other data between the Programs in a simple way. Most often you will use the clipboard to move some selected text inside the program . You will find all these following functions also in the upper part of the "edit" menu, many of them also in the middle part of the toolbar. - + ("Cut") deletes the selected text and put it into the clipboard. - + ("Copy") just copy the selected text into the clipboard. + does the same. - + ("Insert") insert the clipboard content into the current document at the location of the caret. also with +. - + ("Swap") swaps the selection with the clipboard. - ("Delete") just deletes selection. - Cut, copy and delete can also applied to the current line(row) by adding to the respective hotkey. (delete line = ++) - ++ or deletes in the current line all character left or right hand from the caret. - ++ doubles the current line, it inserts a copy of the current line below the current line. - You can also move text by DND (drag'n Drop) in the text and into other programs, if they supporting that. When you want to copy text this way, select it, hold the selection by left-clicking on it and holding the mouse button, hold the (than you see a box with a "+" within under the cursor) and release the mouse button when the caret is at the position where you want to copy the selection to. 6 Search menu and search dialog The editor can search after a given phrase in the current document, in all open docs or just only inside a selected text. This can be done with or without the search dialog, but search opptions can only set by the search dialog or via the config file but i think this is a bit messy. - + calls the search and replace dialog, waiting for you to type the search phrase, an existing selection inside the dialog will be as usual overwritten. With the und keys you can browse the history of search phrases. - If you selected some short text before you call the dialog, this selected text will be inserted as the search phrase, but the selection ranges over multiple lines, the editor will asume that you want to only search inside this selection. Please mind that once you found inside a selection a matching phrase, the match will be selected and you can't no longer search inside the previous selection. - After you typed in your search phrase you should press to jump between the findings of the search phrase in top down direction. If you hold while you press , the direction will be bottom up. If you hold while , the dialog will be closed befor searching. - To search "forward" and "backward" you can also use the mouse. Just click on the toolbar icons with the lens and the blue arrows to jump between finings of the search phrase. In the search dialog are more buttons on the right side for similar purposes like fast search, goto first or last findning and replace. - Below the radio box in the middle of the dialog, where you can select the search scope, is a chackbox called "Auto Wrap". If activ the "next" finding after the last on the bottom of the document is the first at top of the document and vici versa. - If the "Incremental Search" option is activ, the editor searches after the given phrase (starting his search at the top of the document) immediately, every time you type in a new character. - search options: + case sesitive: follow search phrase literally with upper and lowercases + the finding has to be the begin of a word + the finding has to be a complete word + understand simple regular expressions within the search phrase - It is also possible to search without the dialog. Just press + and the currently selected text will become the next search phrase. Now you can use to skip forward and + to skip backward between the matches to the search phrase. ++ jumpes to the first and +++ to the last match inside the selected scope. - When you call the search dialog with ++ it expect you to type in the replace phrase, in the search input line will be inserted the last used search phrase. In case you selected some text before calling the dialog, the behaviour of the replace input will be the same as search input and also the replase input line do remembers its history, so you can select previous phrases with the with the mouse or the 2 vertical arrow keys. - Pushing while active cursor is inside the replace input line will cause the same action as clicking on the "Replace All" button. All matches to the search phrase in the search scope will be replaced with the replace phrase. Holding while closes the dialog after replacing all. If you hold while you press , the same function as the "With Confirmation" button does will be called. It differs only from "Replace All" function in the fact that the editor ask for your permission before each single text replacement. - Another way to achieve the same is to use the search pad rightmost in the dialog. Here can you decide freely where to jump and what to replace by clicking the buttons I described above. - The dialog can be closed by push the -Key with the "Close" button, which is in the bottom right corner. -"Goto Line" or + calls a Dialog where you can type into the number of the line, you wish to jump to. 7 Tools Menu The notepad is a parallel panel, just for keeping a bit of unformatted text. - jumps into the notepad and back. + opens or closes it. inside the notepad does a Perl eval with the content. Results will be shown in the output panel. - runs the current document with a defined interpreter. This process can be stopped with +. The result will be displayed in the output panel. This can be opened and closed with +. 8 File menu Containes all the functionality that has access to your permanent storage (harddrive e.g.). The only exceptions are new and quit, but they belong here too i think. - "New" creates a new empty document which has no relation to any file. - "Open" reads a file which you select by dialog and display it in a new document. - "Reopen" reads an already open file and replaces the displayed content with newly read data from the hard drive. This way will be the last saved version restored. - "Insert" inserts the content of a selected file into the current visible file at the location of the caret (textcursor). - "Save" writes the content of the current visible document into that file from where it was opened. If it was a new file it asks for a filename. - "Save As" always asks for a filename which to write the current doc into. Further calls of the save function will write the doc into the new file. - "Save Copy" does the opposite. It also asks always for a new filename to write the current document into. But the document keeps related to the old file name. - "All/Other" Many of the functions in this menu has an equivalent which conain the words "All" or "Other". As expected "All" means this function will be applied to all open files and "Other" means that it will applied to all open files but not to the current file. - A "Session" is the sum of all current opened files. Such a session can be saved into a sassion file which containes the location and all properties of all open files so you can restore or add this session with this file. I want also that the edito is able to read (import) and write (export) session files from other editors but currently is only SciTE session file format supportet. 9 Document menu - Document settings do (mostly) change a property of the current document. The syntaxstyle und the tabmode can also be set by using the interactive statusbar. All document properties will be saved in the session file and will be restored be the next start of the program. - The syntaxstyle determinates the colouring of document and corresponds with the syntax of the particular language. Normally do the editor selecting the syntaxstyle automaticly according die ending of the file. Under the config key: file > endings is set which ending belongs to what language. The syntaxstyle can also be set manually by the Syntaxstyle submenu in the document menu or by the context menu in statusbar. (right click onto display of current style). If you want change the colouring of a style, look at the bottom of the config menu. - Bracelight highlights matching braces when you "touch" them with the caret. Braces without a matching counterpart will be coloured different to warn the programmer that there might be a problem. The colour and more can be set in the config key: editpanel > indicator > bracelight. Currently these options are global settings but will become part of new syntaxmode settings. - Blockindent means that every after an opening brace indents the next line more than the current and an after an closing brace dedents. The width depends on the current tab size. see config key: editpanel > blockindent. look also at the keys editpanel > brace_automake and editpanel > brace_autojoin that will automaticly make an matching brace or remove the autogenerated brace if it turnes out that you made one manually. - Autoindent inserts in any new line and indention that has same witdth as in the last line. Currently is it only a global behaviour. config key: editpanel > autcoindent. - Tabs are not visible character that will be displayed as a bunch of whitespaces. How many spaces equals one tab depends on your settings. And please note if even your settings say that this number is 4, a tab can also be displayed like 3,2 or one space because a tab reaches to a row position that is a multible of its maximus size. In new or opened files the editor set the value of the config key: "file > defaultsetting > tab_size" as the current tab size. - Soft Tabs means if you press the key (with |<-- -->| symbols on it), the editor will not create several whitespaces with the same width the tab would have instead. config key: file > defaultsetting > tab_use - EOL: Unix(Linux), Mac and Windows are using different characters to indicate the end of a line, but that no problem for the editor because the lines will be cut in any case properly. The editor also recognises which lineending is used by the document and if you edit the doc, proper endings will be inserted. When you want to change the lineendings of an document, use the EOL mode submenu or the context menu on the stausbar. You have to right-click onto the field that displayes the current lineending. The lineending of new documents will be set by the config key: " file > defaultsetting > EOL_new" the values of this key can be: "cr,lf or cr+lf". If the key: "file > defaultsetting > EOL_open" is set with one of these values the file will be converted while opening the file. The default is auto, that keeps the original ending. - Write Protection. When the user has no permission to acess a file,, the editor will automatically lock the document and make the lock visible with a "#"-character after the documents name. That should avoid later conflicts but you can still safe the doc under another name. Or you maybe want to use this feature to protect some mature text against your own inattention. 10 View menu Functions that do only visual changes to the text or the program are summarized here. All Settings here effect all documents equally. - "Stay On Top" you can toggle with + and it means that the main window will always displayed above all other windows. - "Toolbar"-"Statuscontext" This block of menu items switches (toggles) the visibility of the visual(GUI) elements of the program. The elements are sorted from top to the bottom of the applikation window. All menu items blow this block refer to the text area. - "Numbermargin" defines the width of the line number margin. Normally is the width always sufficient to display all line number, but in case you turned the autosize off(config key: editpanel > margin > linenumber > autosize), or want to switch the visibility of the line number margin you can use this submenu. Also color and default width can be changed in the config files. - "Textmargin": Width of the extra margin (in pixel) on the left and right side of the text area. here can you adjust the spacing between the pure text and the margins on the left side. - "Right Margin" Switches visibility of a vertical line that indicates how long the text lines should be at maximum. Color and position of this line can be set in the config at the key: editpanel > indicator > right_margin. - "Indention Guide" toggles vertical lines that do indicating how far to indent your source code. These lines appear above text indention (whitespace) at intervals of the current width of a tab. - "Caret Line", if activated, the current text line will be highlighting with a chosen background color. config key: editpanel > indicator > caret_line - "Line Wrap" means that text lines that don't fit into the current window size will displayed in several parts among each other. - "end Of Line" (EOL) makes the (otherwise invisible) control character that are marking the end of the line visible. They are 3 different types symbolized by 3 different indicators. - "Whitespace" sets whitespaces and tabs visible with dot and arrow symbols. the color of these symbols can be changed by config file. - "Font" calls an dialog, which allows you to change all properties of the displayed font. see also config key editpanel > font 11 Config menu: Shortcuts for opening all config files directly in the editor. Hint: Files with a leading $ in the tab will be applied immediately while saving them. 12 Help menu: Contains texts, links and dialogs with information about this programm and its usage.