PCE - Documentation

This is the index page of the PCE online help. This whole chapter is written more or less user-centric. For deeper informations please orientate on the menu on the right side. If you are interested in the way i think and planned this editor, please read our thoughts.

Navigation Guide

Despite the editor is designed to be nonintrusive, every element of the user interface has its planned purpose and task. The usage will be easier if you know something about but please don't be bored because much of it is common knowledge.

Mainmenu: Is located topmost at the main window and gives you an overview about most available features. To be be able to search features in context it is thematically structured with many submenus and subsubmenus and provides a quick overview about every feature with information about its keyboard shortcut, its representing icon and a short help text in the statusbar.
Toolbar: Is located below the main menu and contains only the icons of the most used functions. That should enable fast work for people who prefer to work with the mouse.
Contextmenu: opens with a click of the right mouse button and provides most important functions that stay in connection with the place the menu is called. It's purpose is similar to the tool bar and should be therefore also customized by the user, just look in the config menu.
Tabbar:
Statusbar: Is located at the bottom line of the main window. It provides informations abot the current status and feedback from your instructions.

Advanced Feature Tour

About all nonstandart basic functions which can improve speed and joy of work. >>

Config Files

This section handles the question what config file is for what purpose. And how you can edit them. Mostly all settings can be written in one big file or many many small but because readability and practical reasons each main task has its own config file. Currently we still using XML vor the menus, Perl to store the syntaxstyles and apache conf format for the rest but conf will be soon our only format. The sections are marked like XML-tags and the content like in looks simple like an ini file. Some thougths about our config file format may help you.

Main config: All main settings and current status informations of the program.
Mainmenu: All infos to build the main menu.
Contextmenu: The settings that define the context menu.
Toolbar: Dito to Toolbar.
Statusbar: Defines the status bar. will come.
Shortcuts: Defines the shortcuts. will come.
Icons: Defines the icon sets. will come.
Syntaxstyles: Holds all kind of information that is related to a programming language. Most of these informations are about how to color syntax elements of the language.
Localisation: Contains all the text from the program like labels, menuitems, tooltips and statusmessages. You only need to translate the messages after the equalsign to translate the whole program into another language. The big advantage to the (with the c language)wide used .po format or similar formats is that you alway know the context of the short messages.

Search Regex

The Regex we use in the simple search dialog, is build in Scintilla. This is a copy from the Scintilla documantation. In a regular expression, special characters interpreted are:


.	Matches any character
\(	This marks the start of a region for tagging a match.
\)	This marks the end of a tagged region.
\n	Where n is 1 through 9 refers to the first through ninth tagged region when replacing. For example, if the search string was Fred$[1-9]$XXX and the replace string was Sam\1YYY, when applied to Fred2XXX this would generate Sam2YYY.
\<	This matches the start of a word using Scintilla's definitions of words.
\>	This matches the end of a word using Scintilla's definition of words.
\x	This allows you to use a character x that would otherwise have a special meaning. For example, \[ would be interpreted as [ and not as the start of a character set.
[...]	This indicates a set of characters, for example, [abc] means any of the characters a, b or c. You can also use ranges, for example [a-z] for any lower case character.
[^...]	The complement of the characters in the set. For example, [^A-Za-z] means any character except an alphabetic character.
^	This matches the start of a line (unless used inside a set, see above).
$	This matches the end of a line.
*	This matches 0 or more times. For example, Sa*m matches Sm, Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on.
+	This matches 1 or more times. For example, Sa+m matches Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on.

FAQ

Any released Mac or Linux Versions? Coming soon but you can build it yourself, its not that hard.

Glossar

Explaining the terms we use frequently.


caret	or textcursor, is a blinking marker for your current position in text, moveable with the keyboard
cursor	is a symbol on the screen that is moved by mouse. It enables a way to control the program.
EOL	End Of Line mode. The line breaking format will ordinary be defined by your operating system. Unix has lf or line feed, Macintosh cr or carry return and Windows cr and lf.
hard tabs	real tabs, a single character that takes the space of several whitespaces
LLI	Long Line Indicator, or right margin is a vertical line on the edit panel. It helps to keep an favoured maximum line width.
soft tabs	a bunch of whitespaces that look like a tab and will inserted if you press the tab key
tab	tabulator character was ment to enable tables in the early times of computing. It is generated by the tab key(on the left side of the keyboard, upon shift) and it is only only character who has width of several characters.