12 The Editor

The environment has a text editor which is designed specifically to make writing Lisp source code easier. By default it emulates the GNU Emacs text editor, and you should refer to the Editor User Guide supplied with your software, for a full description of the extensive range of functions and commands available. It can also emulate a KDE/Gnome style text editor.

The Editor features a comprehensive set of menus, as well as a number of different views, and its interface is consistent with the other tools in the environment. This chapter gives a complete description of these aspects of the Editor, as well as giving you a general overview of how the Editor is used. If you have not used Emacs before, this chapter tells you all you need to know to get started.

The Editor is integrated with the other tools and offers a wide range of operations. The most commonly used of these can accessed using menu commands. The full range of editor commands is accessed via the keyboard commands described in more detail in the Editor User Guide. These operations range from simple tasks such as navigating around a file, to more complex actions which have been specifically designed to ease the task of writing Lisp code.

By becoming familiar with the menu commands available, you can learn to use the Editor effectively in a very short space of time, before moving on to more advanced operations.

Like many other tools, the Editor offers a number of different views, which you can switch between using the tabs at the top of the Editor window. Unlike other tools, one view in particular is used more often than any other.

• The Text view is the most commonly used view in the Editor. This lets you read and edit text files which are stored in your filesystem.
• The Output view shows output messages. Compiler messages are highlighted and you can easily locate the source code that generated them.
• You can edit many different files at once in the same Editor. The Buffers view provides a quick way of navigating between different files that you have open.
• The Definitions view is a convenient way of seeing the classes, functions, macros, variables and so on that are defined in the current file.
• Files may contain many definitions. The Find Definitions view lets you search for particular definitions of interest across many files.

You can create an Editor using any of the following methods:

• Choose Tools > Editor. Notice that you are not actually editing a file immediately when you create an Editor like this.
• Choose File > Open..., or click on in the toolbar, and choose a filename in the dialog that appears.
• Choose File > Recent Files and choose a filename from the submenu that appears.
• Make the Listener the active window, and press Ctrl+X Ctrl+F. Type in the name of a file that you want to edit. If the file is not in the current directory, enter the full pathname. This invokes the Wfind File editor command.
• Choose the command Find Source (available on various menus, for example Frame in the Debugger tool), or click on or to display source code in an Editor tool.
• Use the keyboard accelerator described in 3.1.5 Displaying tools using the keyboard.

Note: this chapter assumes you are using the default Emacs emulation. Thus one way to open a file is with the keystrokes Ctrl+X Ctrl+F as described above. If you use KDE/Gnome keys, you would use instead the keystroke Ctrl+O.

You can always discover which key to use for a particular editor command, or conversely which command is invoked by a particular key. See 12.14 Help with editing for details.

12.1 Displaying and editing files

12.2 Displaying output messages in the Editor

12.3 Displaying and swapping between buffers

12.4 Displaying Common Lisp definitions

12.5 Changed definitions

12.6 Finding definitions

12.7 Setting Editor preferences

12.8 Basic Editor commands

12.9 Other essential commands

12.10 Cutting, copying and pasting using the clipboard

12.11 Cutting, copying and pasting using the kill ring

12.12 Searching and replacing text

12.13 Using Lisp-specific commands

12.14 Help with editing