Global clipboard in !Edit coming soon:-)

I’ve just found out that ROOL demonstrated a yet to be released version of !Edit at the London Show, apparently it sported full clipboard cut and paste (ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v).
Hallelujah!
n.b. I’ve just heard a nasty rumour that CTRL K for cut has infected !Draw :-((((

Surely the only thing people use !Edit for is to read the readme explaining how to install !StrongED? ;-)

!Zap surely rather than !StrongEdit?

Surely the only thing people use !Edit for is to read the readme explaining how to install !StrongED? ;-)

Speaking as a SE user, I think you’re in danger of being Zapped :)

Speaking as a SE user, I think you’re in danger of being Zapped :)

Yes, I’d have been disappointed if nobody had taken the bait :-)

Those !Edit changes do sound useful, though.

Not being a programmer most of the advantages of ZAP and StrongEd are not relevant to me. Also I have to do simple text editing on many different RISC OS machines often belonging to customers so !Edit is often the only editor available to me.
Well that’s the story I’m sticking to, too many people have died over the years in Zap versus StrongEd wars ;-)

I wonder what other nice goodies ROOL have up their sleeve that haven’t made into the public sources yet?

What would be really useful for !Edit is to have a script that would perform sequential replace operations. A command file that could be executed on the contents of the file being edited. For example:
\|M$\$\ (replace CRLF with LF)
\$$\$\ (remove some blank lines)
\$$\$\ (remove some more blank lines)
\d\g\ (replace d with g)
The you could develop command files to do particular (complex) edits and simply implement them when required.

Well that is good news. I prefer edit’s copy and move myself – I find it quicker – but realise that I am a majority of 1 and it doesn’t work well with other programs. Hopefully it will coinside with cut and paste in the wimp.

Bad news about control K proliferation though, with the advent of control K deleting files in the filer I already change edit and srcedit back to control X. I live in fear of the filer claiming the input focus without me realising and deleting who knows what. It looks like I’ll have to add draw to the list of programs to change.

I’d really like to be able to disable filer keyboard shortcuts.

I wonder what other nice goodies ROOL have up their sleeve that haven’t made into the public sources yet?

We’ve got a prototype RISC OS kernel with symmetric multiprocessing support, Wi-Fi support, IPv6 and a WebKit port with fully-working JavaScript here – we’ve been using them for years in the ROOL offices – but you can’t have them. So ner.

(We don’t really.)

but you can’t have them.

RO6 fanboi mode: Don’t care, I’d rather have rounded action buttons /fanboi :)

We’ve got a prototype RISC OS kernel with symmetric multiprocessing support,

That’s good for the iMX6 board.¹

Wi-Fi support,

On-board or USB dongle?²

IPv6

Haha – I think hell will freeze over before Orange get their act together regarding that. They say IPv6 will be around in 2017. I’m not holding my breath, the latest Livebox firmware blows, and they still can’t sort out the SSL certs on their own site…³

and a WebKit port with fully-working JavaScript here

Given that it’s an ARM, wouldn’t it be quicker to make an iOS emulation layer⁴ and just run Dolphin or something? [don’t know if it is possible to easily extract Safari]

Note: I don’t want to be seen as a “fanboi”, but Safari actually works which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for the stock Android 2.x browser. I understand that recent versions of Android have ditched it in favour of Chrome – what more need I say?

Don’t care, I’d rather have rounded action buttons /fanboi :)

Um. Yeah. From time to time I see screenshots with the ROLtd rounded buttons and, wow, it looks really really strange.

However, that said, if that’s what you miss most about RISC OS 4.whatever, I guess somebody might look at twiddling the Wimp’s icon drawing code. Just understand that it’s probably WAY down the bottom of the to-do list, right there with such luxuries as floppy disc handling⁵ and hardware video decoding⁶.

¹ Might happen sooner than you think. Who is going to build a board with a multicore CPU and then only use one of its cores?

² It’s a shame the things don’t behave like the Vonets adaptor – a sort of “go find a signal and talk to it” high level interface. That would make things easier.

³ You can tell I’m a fan, can’t you?

⁴ Just a little weekend hack for the dedicated geek…

⁵ Tested with a FAT disc and USB FDC, always tells me the drive is empty…

⁶ Would be lovely, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.

However, that said, if that’s what you miss most about RISC OS 4.whatever

Me? Er, Extraction of urea.

Extraction of urea.

Ah, nasty stuff, that which the enzyme xanthine oxidase produces from xanthine and hypoxanthine (which in turn are produced from other purines).
But in a pure form it’s not a bad astringent / disinfectant; though it would have to be a really major incident before I’d accept somebody peeing on me would make it better. At the very least, it can be distilled down to be a bad-ass floor cleaner.

Sorry. Err, was the sarcasm of my post above a bit too subtle? Normal tactless service shall be resumed… ;-)

What would be really useful for !Edit is to have a script …

Nowt to do with Edit, really, but all you need is RiscLua. Put the !Apply utility on the iconbar. Drag your textfile to it. Then drag a script to it.
For example, to replace all instances of ‘John’ at the beginning of a line by ‘Henry’, you could use this script.

#!lua
for line in io.lines (arg[1]) do
  print (line:gsub ('^John', 'Henry'))
end

Nowt to do with Edit, really, but all you need is RiscLua

Or other existing tools

n.b. I’ve just heard a nasty rumour that CTRL K for cut has infected !Draw :-((((

Ctrl-K would be for delete outright not cut.

!Zap surely rather than !StrongEdit?

What? You’d rather use something that had its last stable release more than a decade ago over an application that had its last stable release just over 6 months ago (and latest test release just over 2 weeks ago)? The mind boggles. ;-)

What would be really useful for !Edit is to have a script that would perform sequential replace operations.

See you do want StrongED as you can write a script, in just about any language, and apply it to a single text or all texts.

Hopefully it will coinside with cut and paste in the wimp.

CnP in the Wimp is quite different from regular applications as the Wimp isn’t a task and so cannot send/receive messages. You need to use the Clipboard module to do the messaging on the Wimp’s behalf. (The Clipboard module seems to have vanished though, I sometimes wonder why I bothered to complete its clipboard support.)

I’d really like to be able to disable filer keyboard shortcuts.

Use a keymapper and map them to keys that have no effect? Unless, of course, you don’t want the Filer to grab the input focus in the first place.

See you do want StrongED as you can write a script, in just about any language, and apply it to a single text or all texts.

I have never managed to work out how to do this. What is the equivalent to the search string ‘string’ ‘one or more’ ‘not’ ‘LF’ ‘LF’ which finds the remainder of a line after a particular string? In !Edit this would be ‘text^~$$’ which you could then replace by ‘newtext?0 more text ?0$’. FOr example to turn a list of filenames into a rename filename new filename.

See you do want StrongED as you can write a script, in just about any language, and apply it to a single text or all texts.

Sir, Sir, I told him so :)

I have never managed to work out how to do this. What is the equivalent to the search string ‘string’ ‘one or more’ ‘not’ ‘LF’ ‘LF’ which finds the remainder of a line after a particular string?

This might help with many aspects of use.

It helps (for which many thanks), but…

I can see how to replace ‘foo’ with ‘bar’ but I need to know what characters I should use in the search string for ‘one or more’ (Edit uses ^) ‘found string 2’ (Edit uses ‘?1’) etc. Also do I use ["foo*"+CHR$(10)] or [“foo*[LF]”]
Actually I think I can see now – use {…}+ for ‘one or more’ but it seems more complicated and less intuitive than Edit (or dare I say it even than RegEx in perl).

I would definitely write my script in BASIC but there doesn’t seem to be an example?

I would definitely write my script in BASIC but there doesn’t seem to be an example.

See http://www.riscos.info/index.php/Scripting for the likely reason for this.

I think I’ll stick with !Zap (the f7 function is so useful as it is in BasicEdit to show all lines containing the search text) and !Edit (with a written list of the search/replace strings to use, one after another).

I’m afraid I don’t like C and similar languages. I tend to stick to machine code, assembler and BBC BASIC (both RISC OS and Windows) where possible. I do use Perl and Javascript for web applications and forced myself to learn these (I did these as part of a retraining package when I retired in 2005). When SMART (a wordprocessor and database suite) changed to use C-like programmes for scripts rather than BASIC-like programmes for scripts, I abandoned it.

I would therefore consider using Perl for the script – is there an example for this?

it seems more complicated and less intuitive than Edit (or dare I say it even than RegEx in perl).

I’d characterise StrongED’s search syntax as different rather than more complicated. If you like you can use regex for searching (but not S&R) by loading the RegEx module.

I would definitely write my script in BASIC but there doesn’t seem to be an example?

Examples can be found in !StrongED.Defaults.Tools.!ScriptSED.Scripts.

All that you have to do is read the input file from <StrongED$ScrapDir>.Out and write the output to <StrongED$ScrapDir>.In.

If the language supports C style redirection then you don’t even have to do that, it’s done by the script binding in ScriptSED. Here’s the binding for Lua:

lua <StrongED$Script_Script> <StrongED$Script_Infile> > <StrongED$Script_Outfile>

I think I’ll stick with !Zap (the f7 function is so useful as it is in BasicEdit to show all lines containing the search text)

F7 opens the search dbox so is equivalent to F2 in StrongED. In BASIC you often want to find a variable or procedure name, with StrongED this is very easy just put the cursor in the name and press c-F to find all occurrences in the text (use cs-F to search through all open texts).

Another handy option is to jump straight to where a procedure is defined, even when it’s in a different file which is useful for sources made up of multiple files.

and !Edit (with a written list of the search/replace strings to use, one after another).

But you need to copy these to the search dbox each time you want to use them right? Using a script is much easier. In addition StrongED has a global file to hold often used search/replace expression which can be referred to by their name. You can also put StrongED functions in an obey file and apply the file to a text.

as you can write a script, in just about any language,

As I already know Perl (and BASIC is a non-starter) it seems the obvious choice. Is there an equivalent binding for Perl please?

Oddly !StrongEd (sometimes) seems to hide the line numbers of a BASIC programme. How do I insert lines making sure that the existing numbers do not change (adding a few new lines for example in the gaps between lines (say) 1210 and 1220)? When I write documentation I often say things like ‘see lines xxxx to yyyy’ and only change this when I do a major update – otherwise I just add a line or two and and, perhaps, a new procedure at the end.

But you need to copy these to the search dbox each time you want to use them right? Using a script is much easier.

Yes, in principle. But if I only need to do the edit a few times a year and there are only about six search/replace operations to do in sequence then it is not worth learning a new language.

As I already know Perl (and BASIC is a non-starter) it seems the obvious choice. Is there an equivalent binding for Perl please?

Yes, there is a binding for Perl.

Oddly !StrongEd (sometimes) seems to hide the line numbers of a BASIC programme.

There’s an option to control if line numbers are to be stripped (just like in Edit). If line numbers are not stripped then they’ll be part of the actual text, again like Edit.

How do I insert lines making sure that the existing numbers do not change (adding a few new lines for example in the gaps between lines (say) 1210 and 1220)?

As the line numbers are part of the text it’s you that enters the line number, StrongED won’t insert one automatically, so you have full control over them.