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| Kephra Feature List |
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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.
- <Home> moves the caret to the first non-whitespace character in the current
row. Pressing <Home> again moves the caret to the first position.
<end> moves the caret to the end of the row.
- <Ctrl>+<Home> jumps to the first character of your text and <Ctrl>+<end>
to the last.
- The <page up> and <page down> keys move the caret page-wise up or down.
Page means here the size of the visible part of the text.
- <Ctrl>+<page up> or <page down> let the editor turn to next or previous
document. Next refers to the order that is shown in the tabbar.
- <Ctrl>+<enter> or an left-click an the current tab in tabbar turns to the
last used document (switch back).
- <Ctrl>+<left or right arrow> let the caret jump to the start of the next
or previous word.
- <Ctrl>+<up> or <down> scrolls the text line-wise up or down.
- <Alt>+<up> or <down> 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 <Ctrl>+<G> and enter the number
- press <Ctrl>++<Shift><+> and <Ctrl>+<-> to zoom your source/text
2 Selecting text
- Holding <Shift> 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 <Alt> 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 <Ctrl>+<Alt>. In case there is no text marked, <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Up> or
<Down> moves the current line.
- When you hold down <Ctrl> while you're moving text with your mouse,
you instead make a copy of it.
- <Ctrl>+<A> 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 <Shift>-key to a hot key, its meaning will most
likely reversed.
- Any selected text will be deleted if you type ordinary character key.
- The <Ins>-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.
- <Del> deletes the character on the right side of the caret. <Ctrl>+<Del>
erases the whole word. The <backspace> key (<--) deletes the character on
the left side of the caret, accordingly <Ctrl>+<backspace> 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.
- <Ctrl>+<Space> 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, <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<Space>
provide a reverse funcion.
- <Ctrl>+<Tab> (|<- ->|) 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.
- <Ctrl>+<Z> goes one step back and <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<Z> 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. <Alt>+<Z> and <Alt>+<Shift>+<Z> 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. <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Z>
jumpes to the begin and <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Shift>+<Z> 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.
- <Ctrl>+<X> ("Cut") deletes the selected text and put it into the clipboard.
- <Ctrl>+<C> ("Copy") just copy the selected text into the clipboard.
<Ctrl>+<Ins> does the same.
- <Ctrl>+<V> ("Insert") insert the clipboard content into the current document
at the location of the caret. also with <Shift>+<Ins>.
- <Ctrl>+<W> ("Swap") swaps the selection with the clipboard.
- <Del> ("Delete") just deletes selection.
- Cut, copy and delete can also applied to the current line(row) by adding
<Shift> to the respective hotkey. (delete line = <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<Del>)
- <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<L> or <R> deletes in the current line all character left
or right hand from the caret.
- <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<D> 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 <Ctrl> (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.
- <Ctrl>+<F> 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 <Up> und <Down> 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 <Enter> to jump
between the findings of the search phrase in top down direction. If you
hold <Shift> while you press <Enter>, the direction will be bottom up.
If you hold <Ctrl> while <Enter>, 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 <Ctrl>+<F3>
and the currently selected text will become the next search phrase. Now you
can use <F3> to skip forward and <Shift>+<F3> to skip backward between the
matches to the search phrase. <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<F3> jumpes to the first and
<Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Shift>+<F3> to the last match inside the selected scope.
- When you call the search dialog with <Shift>+<Ctrl>+<F> 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 <enter> 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 <Ctrl> while <Enter> closes the dialog after replacing all.
If you hold <Alt> while you press <Enter>, 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 <Esc>-Key with the "Close" button,
which is in the bottom right corner.
-"Goto Line" or <Ctrl>+<G> 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.
- <F4> jumps into the notepad and back. <Ctrl>+<F4> opens or closes it. <F5>
inside the notepad does a Perl eval with the content. Results will be shown
in the output panel.
- <F5> runs the current document with a defined interpreter. This process can
be stopped with <Shift>+<F5>. The result will be displayed in the output
panel. This can be opened and closed with <Ctrl>+<F5>.
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 <enter> after an opening brace indents the
next line more than the current and an <enter> 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 <Tab> 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 <Ctrl>+<T> 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.