edit-menu

IDE Menu

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Allegro CL version 6.2
Unrevised from 6.1

Edit Menu

The Edit Menu contains commands that mostly deal with editing text although some commands are appropriate for non-text objects (Cut and Copy work on components on a form, e.g.) The commands on the menu are:

Undo -- Undoes the last edit-like operation, if possible.

Cut -- Delete the current selection and place it on the clipboard so it can be pasted.

Copy -- Copy the current selection to the clipboard so it can be pasted.

Paste -- Pastes from the clipboard to the current location in the currently-selected window. Usually, text is pasted but controls on a form can also be copied or cut and pasted.

Delete -- Delete the current selection without placing it on the clipboard (so it cannot be pasted).

Select All -- Select all text in a text buffer.

Change Case -- Displays a submenu with UPCASE, downcase, and Capitalize as the commands. Choosing one changes the selected text as desired. Only alphabetic characters are affected. Capitalize leaves words like the and a downcased.

Comment In/Out -- Comment in indents any selected text and puts semicolons at the line beginning making the text into a comment. Comment out uncomments text which was commented in. This is a rote command so commenting out text which was not first commented in has undefined effect.

Reindent -- Rearranges the selected code in a text buffer with traditional Lisp indentation. The pretty-printer configuration property, set directly or with the Pretty Print field on the Editor tab on the Options dialog, affects this command. If the value of that field is :reindent, reindenting will change the indentation of each line but not move things between lines. If the value is :pretty-print, the number of lines and their contents may change to provide the optimal result. The reindenting is simply for appearance. No syntactic changes are made to the code, of course.

Macro expansion commands

The next four commands macroexpand selected forms. The IDE macroexpansion commands are useful only when a complete lisp expression is selected. They are typically used in the IDE Editor, where a lisp expression may be selected by double-clicking immediately to the left of the expression's opening parenthesis. The expanded source code is printed to the Debug Window.

Macro Expand -- Macroexpands the top-level selected macro call iteratively, by calling macroexpand. That is, if the initial expansion produces another top-level macro call, that call will also be expanded and so on, but non-top-level macro calls elsewhere in the form will not be expanded. See Walk Form, which recursively macroexpands all subforms.

Macro Expand Once -- Macroexpands the top-level selected macro call a single time, by calling macroexpand-1.

Walk Form -- does a complete macro expansion of the selected form by recursively macroexpanding all macro calls in the selected form. The related Compiler Walk Form does the same but also considers compiler macros and performs certain other compiler transformations to the source. (Thus, Walk Form applied to (list 1), displays (list 1), because the compiler-macro associated with list is ignored.)

Compiler Walk Form -- does a complete macro expansion of the selected form by recursively macroexpanding all macro calls in the selected form, taking compiler-macros into account and performing certain other compiler transformations to the source. Contrast with the related Compiler Walk Form. (Thus, Compiler Walk Form applied to (list 1), displays (cons 1 nil), because the compiler-macro associated with list is used.)

Set Mark -- Establishes a bookmark (called simply "the mark") at the current text cursor position in the selected editor buffer. The mark is used by the other mark-related commands Swap with Mark and Select to Mark. In particular, Swap with Mark scrolls the buffer back to the mark.
There is only a single mark that is set by the interactive commands, though multiple marks may be set programmatically (see make-mark). Marks know how to retain the same logical position within the text when text before the mark is inserted or deleted.

This command may be useful for returning to a buffer position after some other IDE command scrolls the buffer away from it. For example, if the Find Definition command shows a definition in a pre-existing editor buffer, it first sets the mark before scrolling to the new definition. This allows using the Swap with Mark command to toggle between viewing the newly-found definition and whatever was being viewed in the same editor buffer beforehand.

Swap with Mark -- Sets the selected editor buffer's mark to the current text cursor position, and moves the text cursor to the previous mark position, scrolling the buffer as needed to show that position. In other words, after the mark is set at one position (see Edit | Set Mark) and then the text cursor is moved to some other position, repeatedly invoking Swap with Mark toggles between viewing the two areas of the editor buffer around these two positions.
This command may be useful for returning to a buffer position after some other IDE command scrolls the buffer away from it. For example, if the Find Definition command shows a definition in a pre-existing editor buffer, it first sets the mark before scrolling to the new definition. This allows using the Swap with Mark command to toggle between viewing the newly-found definition and whatever was being viewed in the same editor buffer beforehand.

Select to Mark -- Selects the text in the selected editor buffer between the current text cursor position and the mark position (see Edit | Set Mark). This command may be useful for selecting a large range of text which cannot be scrolled entirely into the editor window.