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Converting to KEDIT for Windows

Overview

Keyboard and mouse

Blocks and selections

PROFILE.KEX and WINPROF.KEX

Colors

Macros

SET options

One-file-per-window

Fonts

Character sets

Printing

Initialization options

Mousebar and toolbar

ID line

Additional reading

Even if you are an experienced KEDIT user, you should at least skim through the User's Guide. In particular, we suggest that you spend some time with User's Guide Chapter 3, ``Using KEDIT'', which gives background information about a number of important topics.

The entire contents of the User's Guide and the Reference Manual, as well as the contents of this booklet, can be accessed interactively via the KEDIT for Windows Help file.

Keyboard and Mouse

CUA and Classic Interfaces

Options Interface dialog box

Most KEDIT for Windows users prefer the CUA interface, because it makes KEDIT work more like their other Windows applications. The CUA interface does take some getting used to for long-time users of text mode KEDIT, because some frequently-used keys have been redefined. For example, in text mode KEDIT the Home key moves the cursor to the command line and executes any pending prefix commands. With KEDIT for Windows' CUA interface, the Home key moves the cursor to the beginning of a line, and you can instead use the F12 key or numeric keypad Plus key to move the cursor to the command line and execute prefix commands.

The Options Interface dialog box can help with the transition to the CUA interface, because in addition to letting you choose between the CUA and Classic interfaces, it lets you adjust the behavior of some frequently-used keys whose definitions have changed in KEDIT for Windows. You can make the following adjustments:

• You can make the Enter key, when pressed in the file area, move the cursor to the start of the next line, as it does in text mode KEDIT, instead of adding a new line to your file, which is the default CUA behavior.

• You can make the Home key move the cursor to the command line and execute any pending prefix commands, as it does in text mode KEDIT, instead of moving to the start of a line, which is the default CUA behavior.

• The default CUA behavior for the Delete key, when pressed at the end of a line of text, is to join that line of text together with the text of the following line. If this is difficult for you to get used to, you can make the Delete key do nothing in this situation, as it does in text mode KEDIT.

• Similarly, the default CUA behavior for the Backspace key, when pressed at the beginning of a line of text, is to join that line of text together with the text of the preceding line. You can instead make the Backspace key do nothing in this situation, as it does in text mode KEDIT.

• The default CUA behavior when you press and release the Alt key alone, and not in combination with any other key, is to activate the menu at the top of the frame window. This can be annoying with a program like KEDIT, that makes use of a number of Alt+letter key combinations, because it is easy to press and release the Alt key by mistake and inadvertently activate the menu. So you can make KEDIT ignore the Alt key in this situation, which is what happens in text mode KEDIT. See User's Guide Section 3.2, ``CUA and Classic Interfaces'', for more about this topic. Chapter 6, ``Keyboard and Mouse Changes'', has a comparison of keyboard and mouse usage in the CUA and Classic interfaces, and User's Guide Chapter 4, ``Keyboard and Mouse'', has all the details for both interfaces.

Blocks and Selections

Classic interface

CUA interface

Persistent blocks work like text mode KEDIT blocks: Alt+L, Alt+B, and Alt+Z mark, respectively, line, box, and stream blocks, and once a block is marked, it remains marked until you unmark it, for example by pressing Alt+U.

Non-persistent blocks are new to KEDIT, and they work more like blocks do in most Windows applications. Non-persistent blocks are usually referred to as selections, since that is the term used for them by most Windows users. Once a selection is marked, you must operate on it immediately, because the selection is unmarked as soon as you reposition the cursor. Additionally, if you mark a selection and then type some text, the selection is deleted and is replaced by the text that you type. This feature is known as typing-replaces-selection.

To mark selections with the keyboard, you can press the Shift key plus a cursor pad key. For example, Shift+Cursor Right extends a selection one character to the right, and Shift+End extends a selection to the end of a line.

To mark selections with the mouse, drag with mouse button 1 to mark a stream selection, drag with Ctrl+mouse button 1 to mark a line selection, and drag with Alt+button 1 to mark a box selection. You can also mark line selections by dragging with mouse button 1 in the margin area at the left edge of a document window, or by dragging with mouse button 1 in the prefix area.

Some users would prefer to have the mouse mark persistent blocks instead of selections. You can use the Options Interface dialog box to adjust this aspect of KEDIT's behavior.

For more about this topic, see User's Guide Section 3.3, ``Blocks and Selections''.

PROFILE.KEX and WINPROF.KEX

WINPROF.KEX

• Most SET options can be controlled through the Options SET Command dialog box, which is discussed below in Section 3.7, ``SET Options'', and then saved in KEDIT's INI file for use in future sessions via the Options Save Settings dialog box, so most SET commands do not need to be included in your profile.

• If your text mode profile redefines the behavior of many of KEDIT's keys and you plan to use the Windows-style CUA interface, you may want to rethink or eliminate some of your key definitions, since they may not fit well with the Windows conventions. For example, Windows programs use Alt+F to access the File menu from the keyboard, and this is what Alt+F does under KEDIT for Windows' CUA interface. But if your profile redefines Alt+F to do something else, you will not have an easy keyboard method of accessing the File menu.

• As discussed in the next section, the handling of colors in KEDIT for Windows is somewhat different than in text mode KEDIT. If your text mode profile issues SET ATTRIBUTES or SET COLOR commands to put your own color scheme into effect, you may want to try KEDIT for Windows' default color scheme for a while, to see what you think of it, or you may want to make some adjustments to your own color scheme.

Suggestions

• We recommend that you keep WINPROF.KEX, and other KEDIT for Windows macros that you develop, in the USER subdirectory of the directory into which you install KEDIT for Windows. This subdirectory is automatically created by the KEDIT for Windows Setup program and is one of the directories that KEDIT for Windows automatically looks in when searching for macros.

• If you want to try your existing profile under KEDIT for Windows, the easiest way to do so is to copy your PROFILE.KEX file to the USER subdirectory of the main KEDITW directory. But instead of immediately getting your existing profile working under KEDIT for Windows, you may want to try KEDIT for a while with no profile, so that you can decide which of the commands in your profile make sense in the Windows environment. Note that you can use the Options SET Command dialog box to control most KEDIT settings, and then use Options Save Settings to make your settings take effect in future editing sessions, without any need to create a profile.

• You may want to maintain two separate KEDIT profiles, a PROFILE.KEX for use with text mode KEDIT and a WINPROF.KEX for use with KEDIT for Windows. That way your PROFILE.KEX can have the settings that work best for you in text mode, while WINPROF.KEX can have the settings that work best in KEDIT for Windows, and can take advantage of new KEDIT for Windows features. This method is recommended for most users.

• Another alternative is to have a single profile that works in both text mode KEDIT and KEDIT for Windows. You can do this by creating a one-line WINPROF.KEX file that uses the command

  'macro profile'
  

  to run PROFILE.KEX, or you can use SET DEFPROFILE to make PROFILE.KEX, rather than WINPROF.KEX, the default profile, and then using Options Save Settings so that this DEFPROFILE setting will take place in future editing sessions.

• If you want your profile to act differently depending on whether you are running under text mode KEDIT or KEDIT for Windows, you can use VERSION.1() to test for KEDIT for Windows. For example,

  if version.1() = 'KEDIT/WINDOWS' then do
     ---Windows-specific commands---
     end
  else do
     ---Text mode-specific commands---
     end
  

  For more about this topic, see User's Guide Chapter 9, ``Tailoring KEDIT''.

Colors

• KEDIT for Windows' default color scheme uses black text on a white background, which is used by many Windows applications, instead of the white text on a blue background used on a color monitor by text mode KEDIT.

• The color names that KEDIT uses have been simplified. The following 16 colors are available: BLACK, WHITE, BLUE, DARK BLUE, CYAN, DARK CYAN, GRAY, DARK GRAY, GREEN, DARK GREEN, MAGENTA, DARK MAGENTA, RED, DARK RED, YELLOW, DARK YELLOW.

• In text mode KEDIT, the dark variant of each color is used if you do not specify otherwise; KEDIT for Windows uses the bright variant. For example, in text mode KEDIT, ``BLUE'' means dark blue; in KEDIT for Windows it means light blue. To get dark blue, you must explicitly specify ``DARK BLUE''.

• In text mode KEDIT, if you use the SET COLOR command and do not indicate the background color for a field, a black background is used. KEDIT for Windows uses a white background in this situation. So

  COLOR CMDLINE BLUE
  

  will now yield blue text on a white background.

• KEDIT for Windows no longer uses special colors on the current line. The current line is instead distinguished by a box that is drawn around it when the cursor is on the command line. So the CURLINE, CBLOCK, CTOFEOF, CHIGHLIGHT, and CTHIGHLIGHT colors are no longer used.

• All of the above SET COLOR changes take effect only when the default of MONITOR WINDOWS is in effect. For compatibility with text mode KEDIT, MONITOR COLOR and MONITOR MONO are also available, although their use is not recommended. They make SET COLOR work much as it did in text mode KEDIT on a color monitor or on the original IBM monochrome monitor.

• KEDIT for Windows makes no use of the DIVIDER, MOUSEBAR, ALERT, DIALOG, SCROLLBAR, or SLIDER colors.

• Four new color settings have been added. COLOR TOOLTIP, which is black on yellow by default, controls the color of the pop-up toolbar help. In the other three cases, only the foreground color involved has an effect, and the background color is ignored: COLOR CURRBOX controls the color of the box drawn around the current line, COLOR BOUNDMARK controls the color of the lines drawn when SET BOUNDMARK is in use, and COLOR COLMARK controls the color of the lines drawn when SET COLMARK is in use; all three of these draw gray lines by default.

• A new command, SET ECOLOR, controls the colors used to highlight keywords, comments, etc. when the syntax coloring facility is active.

Macros

Note that KEDIT for Windows supports only the KEXX subset of REXX and does not support the full REXX language. This is a change from text mode KEDIT, which also supports macros written with Personal REXX and with OS/2 REXX. If you have KEDIT macros written in REXX, as opposed to KEXX, you will need to convert them to KEXX to use them with KEDIT for Windows. Because such a large subset of REXX is built into the KEDIT for Windows version of KEXX, this conversion is almost always possible, but there may be a few situations in which you will need to use text mode KEDIT to run an existing REXX macro.

Most existing KEXX macros will run unchanged in KEDIT for Windows. Changes are necessary mainly for macros that depend on specific screen sizes, on how windows are organized on the screen, and on the finer points of keyboard scan codes and shift states.

We recommend that you keep the KEDIT for Windows macros that you develop in the USER subdirectory of your main KEDITW directory. This subdirectory is automatically created by the KEDIT for Windows Setup program and is one of the directories that KEDIT for Windows automatically looks in when searching for macros.

See User's Guide Chapter 10, ``Using Macros'', for an introduction to KEXX, see User's Guide Chapter 11, ``Sample Macros'', for a detailed description of some sample macros, and see Reference Manual Chapter 6, ``Macro Reference'', for full details on the current version of the KEXX language.

SET Options

The Options Save Settings dialog box displays a list of the settings currently in effect that differ from those already saved, so that you can be sure of exactly which settings are affected. When you tell KEDIT to save your settings, KEDIT writes the current values of those SET options to its INI file. (Not all of the option values are actually written to the INI file; to speed things up, KEDIT only writes out the options whose values differ from the built-in KEDIT default.) These values will then be in effect for future KEDIT sessions and for new files added to the ring in the current session.

You can also save the values of individual SET options by using the Save Setting button from within the Options SET Command dialog box.

During KEDIT initialization, SET options are processed in the following order:

• KEDIT's built-in default values for the SET options are put into effect.

• KEDIT processes the INI file, overriding the default SET option values with any values saved via the Save Settings dialog box.

• KEDIT processes any initialization options specified via the KEDITW environment variable or the command line used to invoke KEDIT.

• KEDIT processes your profile, which can make additional changes to the SET option values. Note that SET commands issued from your profile therefore override the effect of SET commands saved in the INI file.

• After all of this, you can make further changes by issuing the SET command from the KEDIT command line, or by using the Options SET Command dialog box, accessible through the Options menu. Advanced KEDIT users will still need a profile, since there are limitations to the Save Settings facility: the values of some SET options are not saved in the INI file; macro and toolbar definitions are not saved; and the values in the INI file become defaults for all files that you edit. So, for example, if you want different options for different types of files, you still need to control this through your profile. For more about this topic, see User's Guide Chapter 9, ``Tailoring KEDIT''.

One-File-Per-Window

One-file-per-window is not the way that text mode KEDIT works. In text mode KEDIT, there is usually a single window which can display different files at different times. If you want multiple windows, you can use the SET SCREEN command to create them, but each individual window can still display different files at different times, and removing a file from the ring does not remove windows from your screen.

You can use the SET OFPW command to control this aspect of KEDIT for Windows. OFPW ON (that is, one-file-per-window on) is the default and is recommended for most users. OFPW OFF makes multiple windows work as they did in text mode KEDIT.

Note that the SET SCREEN command is not available in one-file-per-window mode. Instead of using SET SCREEN to control how multiple windows appear on the screen, you can use items on the Window menu, such as Window Tile Horizontally or Window Tile Vertically, which arrange your windows neatly on the screen, or Window Arrange, which displays a dialog box that lets you select which of your windows are to be displayed and how they are to be arranged.

For more about this topic, see User's Guide Section 3.5.2, ``One-File-Per-Window''.

Fonts

As a text editor, KEDIT is more concerned with the content of your files than the details of their appearance. This emphasis is perhaps the primary distinction between a text editor like KEDIT and a word processor like Microsoft Word. The font that you select with Options Screen Font is used for all of the text within your files. That is, you cannot display part of a file in one font and another part of a file in a different font.

Because of KEDIT's emphasis on column-oriented data (with features like the scale line, box blocks, and column commands), KEDIT must display each column of data consistently on the screen. Column 10 of each line, for example, must be lined up horizontally with column 10 of every other line. KEDIT, therefore, uses only fixed-pitch fonts (in which each character has the same width) to display text in your document windows, as opposed to the proportional fonts (in which different characters can have different widths) used by many other Windows applications.

For more about this topic, see User's Guide Section 3.6, ``Fonts''.

Character Sets

OEM and ANSI character sets

If you use KEDIT for Windows with an ANSI font and you work with a file that uses the OEM character set (for example, a file created by the DOS version of KEDIT), some of the characters in your file might not display properly. This is not a problem for most U.S. users of KEDIT, since the ANSI and OEM character sets are identical for character codes in the range 32 -- 127, which includes all characters on the standard U.S. keyboard. The character set differences show up in three areas:

• Accented letters, and some special characters like the British pound symbol, have different codes in the OEM and ANSI character sets. If you are using an ANSI font and want to work with a file in the OEM character set that contains these characters, you can convert the file from OEM to ANSI, as discussed in User's Guide Section 3.7.2, ``Converting between OEM and ANSI''.

• The OEM character set contains a number of box-drawing characters that have no equivalents in the ANSI character set. If you need to work with these box-drawing characters, you will need to either use an OEM font within KEDIT for Windows, or you will need to use a text mode editor like KEDIT for DOS.

• Control characters with codes below 32 in the OEM character set correspond to special graphic characters such as smiley faces and musical notes. These characters are not defined in the ANSI character set, and with an ANSI font a dummy character, such as a black rectangle, is displayed whenever they occur. You can still use an ANSI font to work with files that contain these characters, but you can't distinguish visually between them in the way you can in text mode KEDIT. One way to deal with this is to put HEXDISPLAY ON into effect, so that KEDIT will display, on the status line, the character code of the character at the cursor position. Note that these character set issues are not specific to KEDIT, but affect any Windows application that needs to work with DOS files. For a full discussion of this topic, and of KEDIT's facilities for converting between the OEM and ANSI character sets, see User's Guide Section 3.7, ``Character Sets''.

Printing

PRINTER WINDOWS

An advantage of PRINTER WINDOWS is that it gives you access to Windows' device-independent printer handling. You can choose the printer font or margins that you want to use without getting involved with any device-dependent printer control codes.

If you have files that contain device-dependent control codes, however, the device-independence of PRINTER WINDOWS can be a disadvantage, since your printer control codes will not be handled properly. You can bypass the Windows printer handling and send output directly to a printer port such as LPT1: or LPT2: by putting PRINTER LPT1 or PRINTER LPT2 into effect. This makes KEDIT for Windows' printer handling more compatible with text mode KEDIT's print handling and lets you print files that contain device-dependent printer escape codes.

Closing the printer

By default, SET PRINTER's CLOSE|NOCLOSE value is set to CLOSE, and KEDIT closes your printer after each use of the PRINT command. This is different from the behavior of text mode KEDIT, which does not close your printer until you issue a PRINT
CLOSE command. If you are using multiple PRINT commands to print data on a single page (for example, by issuing multiple PRINT LINE commands from within a macro), you will need to change SET PRINTER's CLOSE|NOCLOSE setting from its default of CLOSE to NOCLOSE. This will prevent KEDIT from automatically closing the printer, which normally also involves a page eject, after each of your PRINT commands. You can then, as in text mode KEDIT, use PRINT CLOSE when you are ready to close the printer.

Regardless of SET PRINTER's CLOSE|NOCLOSE setting, KEDIT for Windows closes your printer automatically when you leave KEDIT, when you switch from KEDIT to another application, and when you use the SET PRINTER command to switch to a different printer.

For more about this topic, see the descriptions of the PRINT command and of the SET PRINTER option in the Reference Manual.

Initialization Options

KEDITW environment variable

You can still specify initialization options through an environment variable with KEDIT for Windows, but the environment variable to use is KEDITW rather than KEDIT. For example, in your AUTOEXEC.BAT you might set the KEDITW environment variable as follows:

SET KEDITW=WIDTH 2048

Command line options

C:\KEDITW\KEDITW (WIDTH 2048

Alternatives

Other initialization options that are frequently used with text mode KEDIT include DEFPROFILE, PATH, and MACROPATH. KEDIT for Windows has SET options corresponding to each of these, and you can use the Options Save Settings dialog box to save their values in KEDIT's INI file so that they will take effect in future editing sessions.

For more about KEDIT's initialization options, see Reference Manual Chapter 2, ``Invoking KEDIT''.

Mousebar and Toolbar

KEDIT for Windows' equivalent of the mousebar is the toolbar. A toolbar with a set of useful buttons appears by default at the top of the frame window, and you can use the SET TOOLBAR command to display a second toolbar, with additional useful buttons, at the bottom of the frame window. You can use the SET TOOLBUTTON command to define additional buttons, and then use the SET TOOLSET command to display these buttons on a toolbar.

For compatibility with KEDIT 5.0, KEDIT for Windows emulates existing SET MOUSETEXT commands, so that if you defined your own mousebar in KEDIT 5.0, you can still use it in KEDIT for Windows. You will need to put TOOLBAR ON BOTH into effect, and your mousebar will show up as the bottom toolbar.

For information about how to make changes to KEDIT's default toolbars, see the descriptions of SET TOOLBUTTON and SET TOOLSET in the Reference Manual.

ID Line

The absence of the ID line may require slight adjustments in some existing profiles. For example, some KEDIT users like to display the command line at the top of the window rather than at the bottom, and to display the current line and scale line immediately below the command line. In text mode KEDIT they might have the following commands in their profile:

'cmdline top'
'curline on 3'
'scale on 4'

But in KEDIT for Windows, since the ID line not displayed, this gives you the command line on line 1, some line of your file on line 2, the current line on line 3, and the scale line on line 4. Things don't look right, because the command line moved up to line 1, but the current line and scale line did not move. To adjust for this, you could use the following in your KEDIT for Windows profile:

'cmdline top'
'curline on 2'
'scale on 3'