Editor Settings

Help index


Use the New Code Editor 2

Controls if the new or old code editor should be used.
The new code editor adds a line number bar, line number breakpoints and highlighting of variables and selectors. It is experimental and some functions may not work fully (breakpoint-on-line functions).
The default is on (i.e. to use the new code editor).

Show Accept/Cancel Bar in Editor

Show an Accept/Cancel bar at the right of text editors. These serve two purposes: 1) to indicate that the text has been modified, 2) for easy accept/cancel/compare.
Click on the green area to accept the changes, the red area to cancel (undo all) of your changes, and the yellow area to compare your changed text against the original.

Notice, that the CodeView2 implements its own embedded accept/cancel bar, but is only usable with code, not with other editors. If you prefer the codeView2's embedded bar, disable this flag here.

(Yes, we know this is confusing, but the two mechanisms have been developed by different teams, and each prefers its own...)

SearchBox is Modal

If on, text-search-boxes are modal. If off, they stay open as floating dialogs, for easier incremental search operations. The default is modal.

Code Completion as you Type

This enables "as you type" completion suggestions to be shown in a floating menu, which opens automatically and updates itself as you type. Once the suggestions appear, press CRSR-DOWN, CRSR-UP to navigate to a suggestion and hit RETURN to insert it. Pressing any graphical key updates the list of suggestions. Any other non-graphical key closes the suggestion viewer (especially: ESC).

The suggestions include variable names and selectors of Smalltalk code. Also, any abbreviations (snippets - see Workspace documentation) are presented at the end of the list (thus, as single CRSR-UP is needed to select the abbreviation).

The opinions on whether this is a great feature or rather disturbing are varying among users, so you may prefer one of the explicit completion options below, or stick with the old (CTRL-Space) explicit completion and (ALT-SPACE) explicit abbreviation commands.

Code Completion on CTRL

This enables completion suggestions to be shown when the CTRL key is pressed (but only if the character before the cursor is a non-separator). This may be less disturbing than the above, but requires and extra key press. It may also interfere with CTRL-key commands.

Code Completion on TAB

This enables completion suggestions to be shown when the TAB key is pressed (but only if the character before the cursor is a non-separator). Press TAB again, for a real tab position change.

This may be less disturbing than the above, but requires and extra key press. This may be disturbing if you have to editor tabulator aligned columnar data tables, where many tabs are to be entered inside the text.

Tab Stops in Multiples of 4

Toggles tab stops between multiples-of-4 and multiples-of-8.

Notice and warning: the tab stop setting ONLY affects the cursor positioning in the editor. When loading/saving code from/into a file, tab stops are always assumed to be in multiples of 8. Also, when saving, leading spaces in multiples of 8 are written as an appropriate number of tabs into the file. This is required for some files, such as Makefiles. When editing these files, make sure that your texteditor shows at least 8 spaces in the make rule lines (but not in target lines).

CTRL-Key to Start TextDrag

If on, text-dragging out of a TextView is only initiated if the CTRL-key is pressed simultaneously.
Otherwise, a mouse-move with the left button pressed initiates a text-drag.
The default is to require the CTRL to be pressed.

Always Paste the Contents when Dropping a File

When dragging a file from the desktop or another application into a text view (workspace, browser, etc.), you are normally asked if the contents of the file or alternatively the name of the file is to be pasted. This toggle disables that confirmation and enforces that the contents is always pasted.
Use this, if many files are to be dropped.

Autoindent on Return

Enables autoindent. After hitting the Return-key, the cursor is positioned on an appropriate column. Also, it remembers how it indented previously, and changes the Backspace behavior to remove multiple spaces if required.

ST80 Cursor Behavior in EditTextView

If enabled, the text cursor behaves as in the ST80 textView (and also as in many other editing systems), in that the cursors position is limited to the actual dimension of the underlying text (the ``text-stream'' philosophy as in the ''vi'' editor). I.e. the text cursor cannot be positioned beyond the last character within a text line and cannot be positioned beyond the last line vertically.

The default ST/X behavior is to treat editText as if it was a piece-of-paper, where random-posioning is always posible, automatically adjusting the texts size as required. (the ``piece-of-paper-WYSIWYG'' philosophy, as in the ''RAND'' editor.)

Select All when Clicking Beyond End of Text

If enabled, a click beyond the very last text line selects the whole text. This is the behavior of some other (Smalltalk-) editors, but not everybody likes it, as it often leads to text being selected by accident.

ST80 Double Click Select Behavior

If enabled, text selection via double click behaves as in ST80, which is sligtly different from ST/X's normal (word-select) behavior:

The above rules are not applied, if you double click on an opening or closing bracket or parenthesis. Then, the bracketed text is selected, including the brackets, as usual.

Extended Character-Set in Word-Select

If enabled, word detection includes the underline character in text editor views.
This affects the double click behavior, when clicking into a word. If on, words connected with underline characters are treated as a single word; if not, they are treated as separate words.

Notice, that in a code-showing view, the underline character is always treated like an alphanumeric character.
(Caveat: this should probably be a view-specific setting, instead of a global one).

Any non-Whitespace in Word-Select

If enabled, any non-Whitespace character is included in the selection when performing a word-select.
This affects the double click behavior, when clicking into a word. If on, non-space and non-letter characters such as comma, period etc. will also be included in the selection. if not, they are treated as separators.

The style to be used depends on your personal preferences and also on which kind of text (documentation vs. code) is what you intend to work with mostly.
(Caveat: this should probably be a view-specific setting, instead of a global one).


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Doc $Revision: 1.16 $ $Date: 2014/06/13 08:14:47 $