The editor
The editor has a number of useful features with which to make editing your documents easier.
(at least thats the aim)
- Syntax highlighting
- Inline tagging
- Context sensitive menu
- Auto completion
- Auto entity insertion
Syntax highlighting
With HTML documents all tags will be highlighted if you have this feature enabled. The tags
are organised into groups and you can select a fore and back colour for each group.
For Perl documents there is currently only fixed syntax highlighting.
The highlighting isn't done very well, but I think its better than the alternative of it being
unstable and risking loosing what you are editing, as is the case with the GtkEditor widget.
Inline tagging
This is a particularly nice feature, by which, you get a popup menu of all the legal HTML 4.0
attributes for the current tag. It works as follows.
<BODY|>
Where the " | " character is the cursor. Now if space is pressed when the cursor is
after the tag name, but still inside the <> pair then the popup will appear.
Now you may not actually want to use the popup menu, in which case if you just ignore it and
keep typing it will disappear. This option can be disabled in the preferences if you so wish, and
is turned OFF by default.
Context sensitive menu
A right click anywhere in the editor will popup the editor menu. This allows you to save pages,
create new ones, gives closer access to the edit and CVS menus, and also allows you to execute
helper applications and plugin scripts. There are two other options that may appear on the menu
(when working with HTML documents) that may appear if you click on a tag. These are:
<TAG NAME> at the top
and
"Tag Attributes" at the bottom
The first gives you access to the same menu as that of the inline tagging option, the second
will open a dialog up which allows you to edit all the attributes for a tag at once.
If the document you are editing is a java source file then a "Java" menu will appear
at the top. This gives you access to a user definable java compiler.
Auto completion
This is performed whenever a < character is entered, so long as a matching > isn't found,
and the cursor is placed between them ready for you to enter the tag name.
The same is performed whenever a & character is entered so you can enter the entity
name.
Auto entity insertion
Some languages use characters which are not part of the normal ascii character set, such as
German letters with umlauts above them. The editor will recognise these characters when you
type them and insert the appropriate HTML entity for them.