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The interface options panel

The interface options panel

Select Interface options... (Options menu, Shift Ctrl I) to open the interface options panel and customize the general looks and sounds of the editor.

A number of Panel placement and text placement options can be selected; the safest setting is window manager, and is necessary for some window managers. It means that placement of all windows is identical to what you would expect for simple X applications. Centre will centre panels on the screen. Mouse will attempt to place panels near the mouse pointer. Intelligent placement puts windows next to other windows, in those places where they cover the least amount of space in other windows.

The cursor blink rate for both texts and dialog panels can be set in milliseconds. The value zero means that the cursor will not blink.

Furthermore, you can choose how often you want to hear a bell sound. This is especially useful when the status line is switched off. Select

feedback
when you want to hear sounds to confirm the operations Copy (Edit menu, Alt C) and Put marker (Mark menu, Alt P).
warnings
when you want to hear warning sounds in the following cases: search failure, bracket mismatch, warning bell near end of line (not in auto wrap mode), and a few more rare ones.

When actively set focus and warp mouse is selected, Edith will attempt to keep the `input focus' where you are most likely to want to type, by both requesting the focus and warping the mouse around. When this feature is switched on, Edith can be operated practically without using the mouse, even when many different windows are involved; however, it may not work properly with all window managers.

Finally, you can choose here whether Edith should always ask for a confirmation when you select Quit (File menu, Shift Ctrl Q). When the configuration (everything under the options menu) has changed however, you will always get a warning box before Edith really exits.

HANDS-FREE WINDOW MANAGEMENT

If your window manager acts favourably, you should in principle select intelligent placement and actively set focus and warp mouse in the interface options panel. This reduces the number of cases you will need to move the mouse to the windows you want to work in (this is often annoying in graphical-user-interface applications that pop up lots of informational message boxes).

You can cycle between different windows using Cycle texts (Windows menu, Ctrl Tab); text windows can be arranged in a tiled pattern using Tile vertically (Windows menu, Shift Ctrl V) and Tile horizontally (Windows menu, Shift Ctrl H). Windows can be moved around the screen by holding down Ctrl and pressing one of the arrow keys on the numerical pad. On some systems, num lock has to be selected for this function to work (experts may work around this using xmodmap, which can be recommended especially for Linux users).

SUPPORTED WINDOW MANAGERS

Edith Pro has been tested under various methods of window placement with 4Dwm, fvwm 1.2, mwm, twm and tvtwm. Intelligent placement is known not to work with vtwm. For these functions to work properly with all window managers, a certain amount of knowledge about the behaviour of various window managers is necessary. Therefore if this behaviour changes in future versions, this might have consequences for some of Edith's window placement modes. Please report any problems with window managers immediately so a fix can be considered.
Index  Menus  Panels  Troubleshooting  Key glossary  Glossary
File options  Highlighting styles