Edit Menu

The Edit Menu contains commands that mostly deal with editing text although some commands are appropriate for non-text objects (Cut and Copy work on components on a form, e.g.) The commands on the menu are:

• Undo -- Undoes the last edit-like operation, if possible. See undo-command.

• Redo -- Redoes the last undone edit-like operation on text-edit-panes, if possible. Only available on Windows. See redo-command.

• Cut -- Deletes the current selection and places it on the clipboard so it can be pasted.

• Copy -- Copies the current selection to the clipboard so it can be pasted.

• Paste -- Pastes from the clipboard to the current location in the currently-selected window. Usually, text is pasted but controls on a form can also be copied or cut and pasted. See also Pop and Paste below.

• Pop and Paste -- Pops the topmost item off of the Lisp clipboard stack, and then pastes the item that is now at the top of the stack. Doing a Paste followed by a Pop and Paste, for example, would paste the two most recently copied objects.

• Delete -- Deletes the current selection without placing it on the clipboard (so it cannot be pasted).

• Select All -- Selects all text in a text buffer.

• Change Case -- Displays a submenu with UPCASE, downcase, and Capitalize as the commands. Choosing one changes the selected text as desired. Only alphabetic characters are affected. Capitalize typically leaves words like the and a downcased, but the first selected letter is always upcased.

• Comment In/Out -- Comment in indents any selected text and puts semicolons at the line beginning making the text into a comment. Comment out uncomments text which was commented in. This is a rote command so commenting out text which was not first commented in has undefined effect.

• Reindent -- Rearranges the selected code in a text buffer with traditional Lisp indentation. The pretty-printer configuration property, set directly or with the Pretty Print field on the Editor tab on the Options dialog, affects this command. If the value of that field is :reindent, reindenting will change the indentation of each line but not move things between lines. If the value is :pretty-print, the number of lines and their contents may change to provide the optimal result. The reindenting is simply for appearance. No syntactic changes are made to the code, of course. If reindenting a large form is taking too long, it can be interrupted by pressing the Escape key. The form may be left partially reindented, though, if indentation is interrupted.

• Insert Special Char -- Allows you to insert an untypable character either into the editor or into any other text-editing widget in the IDE. A dialog of all characters in the Latin1 character set is shown, and the one that you select will be inserted. This may be useful, for example, in the modal Search | Find Forward or Search | Find Backward dialog or the Search | Find Definition dialog. For single-line editable-text controls, you may need to use the Control-Q keyboard shortcut rather than showing the menu, or else the current text cursor position will not be retained for the insertion.

• Colorize Definition -- Colorizes the top-level definition that surrounds the text cursor in the editor. The IDE never saves colorization into the file that is written from an editor buffer. See the colorize-source-code and the Editor Color tab on the Options dialog.

• Colorize Buffer -- Colorizes all of the source code in the currently selected editor buffer. See the colorize-source-code and the Editor Color tab on the Options dialog.

Macro expansion commands

The next four commands macroexpand selected forms. The IDE macroexpansion commands are useful only when a complete lisp expression is selected. They are typically used in the IDE Editor, where a lisp expression may be selected by double-clicking immediately to the left of the expression's opening parenthesis. The expanded source code is printed to the Debug Window.

• Macro Expand Once -- Macroexpands the top-level selected macro call a single time, by calling macroexpand-1.

• Macro Expand -- Macroexpands the top-level selected macro call iteratively, by calling macroexpand. That is, if the initial expansion produces another top-level macro call, that call will also be expanded and so on, but non-top-level macro calls elsewhere in the form will not be expanded. See Walk Form, which recursively macroexpands all subforms.

• Walk Form -- does a complete macro expansion of the selected form by recursively macroexpanding all macro calls in the selected form. The related Compiler Walk Form does the same but also considers compiler macros and performs certain other compiler transformations to the source. (Thus, Walk Form applied to (list 1), displays (list 1), because the compiler-macro associated with list is ignored.)

• Compiler Walk Form -- does a complete macro expansion of the selected form by recursively macroexpanding all macro calls in the selected form, taking compiler-macros into account and performing certain other compiler transformations to the source. Contrast with the related Walk Form. (Thus, Compiler Walk Form applied to (list 1), displays (cons 1 nil), because the compiler-macro associated with list is used.)

Mark and selection commands

The final four commands deal with the mark (a specified location in text) and with selected text.

The first two commands, Set Mark and Swap with Mark, may be useful for returning to a buffer position after some other IDE command scrolls the buffer away from it. For example, if the Find Definition command shows a definition in a pre-existing editor buffer, it first sets the mark before scrolling to the new definition. This allows using the Swap with Mark command to toggle between viewing the newly-found definition and whatever was being viewed in the same editor buffer beforehand.

• Set Mark -- Establishes a bookmark (called simply "the mark") at the current text cursor position in the selected editor buffer. The mark is used by the other mark-related commands Swap with Mark and Select to Mark. In particular, Swap with Mark scrolls the buffer back to the mark.

  There is only a single mark that is set by the interactive commands, though multiple marks may be set programmatically (see make-mark). Marks know how to retain the same logical position within the text when text before the mark is inserted or deleted.

• Swap with Mark -- Sets the selected editor buffer's mark to the current text cursor position, and moves the text cursor to the previous mark position, scrolling the buffer as needed to show that position. In other words, after the mark is set at one position (see Edit | Set Mark) and then the text cursor is moved to some other position, repeatedly invoking Swap with Mark toggles between viewing the two areas of the editor buffer around these two positions.

• Select to Mark -- Selects the text in the selected editor buffer between the current text cursor position and the mark position (see Edit | Set Mark). This command may be useful for selecting a large range of text which cannot be scrolled entirely into the editor window.

• Display Selection -- Scrolls the selected editor buffer so that the currently selected text (or the current text cursor position if no text is selected) is in view. (The text cursor position may not be in view if, for example, the scrollbars have been used to scroll it out of view.)

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This page was not revised from the 8.2 page.
Created 2012.5.30.