Wednesday, 14 November 2018

Action Diagram Keyboard Selection


Unlike the legacy toolset, the new Action Diagram provides a keyboard caret-style cursor which can be moved around the diagram character- by-character, which gives the look-and-feel of being a text editor.  While this is not actually the case underneath, it does make navigation and editing more intuitive and flexible.

The caret is a flashing vertical bar, similar to any traditional text editor.

In general, typing at the caret is only possible while there are no selections made.  Selections can be one of a number of types:
  1. Entire lines
  2. Entire statements/blocks/views
  3. One or more ‘elements’ within a single statement/clause
  4. A block of contiguous characters within a single element

Highlighting one or more elements is perhaps the most flexible facility, particularly within an expression, where you can replace blocks of elements with new elements, thus making expression editing very simple – remember in the legacy toolset where you would have to recode the entire statement in order to make some simple structure change to an expression? …no longer a restriction!


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