The Edit class in Tycho provides a text editor window. It is derived from the File class, and therefore inherits all of its features. Several classes derived from Edit provide specialized editors for a variety of uses. All of these share the same keyboard shortcuts for moving the insertion cursor, modifying text, and paging through a document. Equivalent commands are also available in the pull-down menus at the top.
The Edit class provides the following special features:
Find/Change
search
. This is a fairly sophisticated search
mechanism that includes facilities for identifying only whole words,
considering case, using regular expressions, and changing all instances
at once. When a search is launched, all matches are highlighted in the
text. You can then step through the matches one by one by repeating the
search.
Incremental search
Incremental search is a quick alternative to Find/Change that uses
the minibuffer at the bottom of the text editor window and matches
characters as you type them. You can search backwards or forwards
by using different keyboard shortcuts (or menu commands).
Note that the keyboard shortcuts are documented in the pull-down
menus.
Spelling checker
. The
spelling checker invokes an external spell
or
ispell
command (which must be installed on your system) and
highlights all whole words that the spell command identified as being
misspelled. In specialized editors derived from this one, a subset of
the text may be checked for spelling errors. For example, in a
language-specific programming editor, only comments will be checked.
In the HTML editor, HTML directives are ignored.
Fill
. In the
Format
menu, three commands support filling text. The
Fill Region
command
restructures the selected text to make all lines approximately the
same length. The Right Fill
Column
command queries the user for the maximum line length
to use in filling. The Set Fill
Prefix
command queries the user for a prefix (such as a
comment character) to use when filling text. In language-specific
derived classes, this prefix is set by default to the comment
character(s) for the language.
Print
. In the
File
menu, the Print
command can be used to
print the entire contents of the text widget or, if there is a
selection, the selected area. The user is prompted for the command to
use for printing.