editor.htm

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Other Features


Bracket Matching

A handy feature of the Understand editor is syntax bracket matching. Use this feature to find the matching ending bracket of syntactically used braces, parenthesis and brackets. Symbols matched are (,),{,},[,]. Matching isn't done inside comments.

There are two modes. The first is the use of the keystroke CTRL-M to "match" a brace, parenthesis or bracket that the cursor is over. CTRL-M isn't active unless over a symbol that it can match. CTRL-M then jumps the editor to the matching end or beginning brace. Another CTRL-M takes you back where you started. Try it - most programmers who try it come to depend on it.

Another variant of bracket matching is that when enabled each time you type one of the bracketing symbols the editor will quickly highlight the entire region being bracketed. This too is handy for quickly and efficiently entering syntactically correct code that does what you hope it does.

Printing Source Files

The menu option File->Print will send the currently viewed source file to the printer. The printout will use 66 lines per page. As with other printing, the Windows driver setup is used on Windows and see Printing Graphical Views for details of printing on Unix and VMS machines.

File Display Options

In addition to Line Numbers many things can be controlled from the File tab of the Options->Preferences dialog:

· Show Line Numbers - check (the default) to turn on line numbers in the source view
· Highlight Matching Brackets - check to enable matching of brackets. See description Bracket Matching.
· Convert new tabs to spaces - check to have any new tabs replaced with spaces while editing.
· Convert existing tabs to spaces during save - check to have any existing tabs replaced with spaces when the file is saved.
· Tab size - the number of blank spaces to show tabs using
· Font Size - font size to use when displaying or printing
· New Files as.... - Sets the type of file to create when making a new file. PC means DOS/Windows line endings (Carriage Return/Line Feed). Unix means Unix line endings (just Carriage Return)
· Save Files as - whether to force a given type or to preserve the type the file was when edited. The default is to preserve the type.
· When files are modified externally.... - If a file is changed from an external source while Understand edits it it will detect this. Check "prompt" if you want to be notified and asked to load that changed version. Auto-Reload will do this without prompting. Ignore is dangerous and not recommended.

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