Common LispWorks Guide to the Editor supplied with your software, for a full description of the extensive range of functions and commands available. The editor features a comprehensive set of menus, as well as a number of different views, and it has an interface which is completely consistent with all the other tools in the environment. This chapter gives a complete description of these aspects of the editor, as well as giving you a general overview of how the editor is used. If you have not used EMACS before, this chapter tells you all you need to know to get started.
The advantage of the editor is its ability to perform a wide range of operations by using menu commands, as well as the keyboard commands described in more detail in the Common LispWorks Guide to the Editor. These operations range from simple tasks such as navigating around a file, to more complex actions which have been specifically designed to ease the task of writing Lisp code. By becoming familiar with the menu commands available, you can learn to use the editor effectively in a very short space of time, before moving on to more advanced operations.
Like other tools, the editor offers a number of different views. Unlike other tools, one view in particular is used more often than any other.
- The text view is the most commonly used view in the editor. This lets you read and edit text files which are stored in your filesystem.
- You can edit many different files at once in the editor. The buffers view provides a quick way of navigating between different files that you have open.
- The definitions view is a convenient way of seeing the classes, functions, macros, variables and so on that are defined in the current file.
- A given file may contain many definitions, some of which you have edited in the current session. The changed definitions view lets you examine only these definitions.
- The output view lets you examine any output messages from the environment.
You can create an editor using any of the following methods:- Choose Works > Tools > Editor in any window.
- Choose File > Open from any tool which has a File menu (such as the listener, or the file browser), and choose a filename in the dialog that appears.
- Place the mouse pointer over the echo podium, or over the listener, and press
Ctrl-X Ctrl-F. Type in the name of a file that you want to edit, including its full pathname if it is not in the current directory.
- Note that you must use either the echo area of the listener or the echo podium (depending where the mouse pointer was when you typed the command) to specify the filename. There is more information about this in Section 8.1.2 on page 85.
Notice that when you create an editor from the Works menu, you are not actually editing a file immediately. - 8.1 - Displaying and editing files
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- 8.2 - Displaying and swapping between buffers
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- 8.3 - Displaying Common Lisp definitions
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- 8.4 - Displaying definitions which have changed
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- 8.5 - Displaying output messages in the editor
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- 8.6 - Configuring the display
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- 8.7 - Getting started with the editor
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- 8.8 - Other essential commands
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- 8.9 - Cutting, copying and pasting using the clipboard
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- 8.10 - Cutting, copying and pasting using the kill ring
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- 8.11 - Searching and replacing text
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- 8.12 - Using Lisp-specific commands
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- 8.13 - Help with editing
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Common LispWorks User Guide, Liquid Common Lisp Version 5.0 - 18 OCT 1996 
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