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The text window modes panel

The text window modes panel

Select Text window modes... (Windows menu, Shift Control M) to open the text window modes panel. This panel lets you manage eight custom types, and three predefined types of text windows.

The three preset text window files have a fixed purpose; these are default (Default setup), used for editing `generic' files. binary (Binary editors) for Open binary... (File menu, Shift Control O) and browser (Info browsers) for the info browser (Edith info index (Edith menu, Control I), System manual... (Browse menu, Control M), New view on window (Windows menu, Alt N) etc.)

For the other 8 modes, you can choose whether these modes should have individual parameters for e.g. colour settings and dimensions. When a text mode does not have individual parameters, the ones for the Default setup apply.

For the non-preset modes, you can specify an additional name and a set of file masks. These are supposed to match the types of file you most frequently edit; modes shipped with the initial Edith configuration are user1: C/C++, user2: HTML and user3: LaTeX, which provide text shortcuts for three popular computer languages. Files matching the specified masks will automatically be opened in the corresponding user-defined text mode, and hence get their own colouring, font, editor parameters and shortcut sets. User defined modes are automatically selected on loading a text, based on the name of a file (e.g. in a mode for HTML editing the triggering file mask could be *.htm*). If no name is matched, the default mode will be selected.

The number of language-specific settings is still limited, but will be extended later. Planned are indentation rules, bracketing and quotes, and text macros (which require a form of multi-stage undo if we want to allow them to stretch out over more than one line).


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