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3 Common Features

The LispWorks IDE has been designed so that its features are consistent throughout, and tools have a uniform look and feel. All tools have certain characteristics which look the same, and behave in a consistent manner. By making as many common features as possible, learning how to use each tool is much simpler.

2 A Short Tutorial, introduced you to some of the major tools in the environment, demonstrating the commonality and high integration between them, and showing how this can be used to good effect in the development process. This chapter describes these common features in more detail.

Whenever LispWorks is the active application, the LispWorks menus can be used and, by default, the LispWorks Toolbar is visible.

Initially the LispWorks Toolbar appears at top left of your screen as shown in Menus and toolbar in the LispWorks IDE, although you may reposition it as you prefer by dragging it.

Menus and toolbar in the LispWorks IDE

The buttons in the LispWorks Toolbar access the Listener, Editor, Output Browser, Inspector, Class Browser, Generic Function Browser, Symbol Browser, Object Clipboard, Function Call Browser, Code Coverage Browser, System Browser, Compilation Conditions Browser, Grep Browser, Profiler, Tracer, Stepper, Window Browser, Process Browser, Shell and Application Builder tools. Hold the mouse over one of these icons for a second to show the corresponding tool name as floating help text.

You can hide the LispWorks Toolbar. To do this, choose LispWorks > Preferences... > Environment > General and deselect the option Show the tools on a floating toolbar.

Most of the common features in the environment can be found under the File, Edit, History, Window and Help menus. Other menus may also be available depending on the current tool. LispWorks for Macintosh also has the standard application menu LispWorks. By default, the LispWorks IDE starts a Listener tool so you will see the menu bar for that tool. But, whatever LispWorks tool is current, you will always have the LispWorks, File and Window menus. Using the commands available under these menus you can:

Each menu command operates on the window associated with the menu.

In addition, some other conventions have been adopted throughout the LispWorks IDE:

These features are described in full in this chapter. Please note that subsequent descriptions of individual tools in the environment do not include a description of these menus, unless a feature specific to the individual tool is described.

Online help is also available from the Help menu in any window. These facilities are described in 4 Getting Help.

Many tools allow you to display information in the form of a graph. These graph views behave consistently throughout the environment, and a description of the graph features offered is given in 6 Manipulating Graphs.

3.1 Displaying tool windows

3.2 Setting preferences

3.3 Performing editing functions

3.4 The Break gesture

3.5 The history list

3.6 Operating on files

3.7 Displaying packages

3.8 Performing operations on selected objects

3.9 Using different views

3.10 Tracing symbols from tools

3.11 Linking tools together

3.12 Filtering information

3.13 Regexp matching

3.14 Completion

3.15 The Commands menu

3.16 Output and Input to/from the standard streams

3.17 Examining a window

3.18 Specifying the initial tools

3.19 System preferences affecting the IDE tools


LispWorks IDE User Guide (Macintosh version) - 01 Dec 2021 19:36:18