Column Mode Editing

In Igor 7 we added facilities that allow you to use an external editor: Igor will notice when you have saved changes to a procedure file or plain-text notebook using an editor outside of Igor. This makes it much easier to use your favorite editor with special features like column-editing mode.

Please read:
DisplayHelpTopic "Using an External Text Editor"

John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

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I know of the new Igor 7 external editor support and it is indeed very useful.

However, to my knowledge the internal editor has still some unique advantages I use regularly:
- the go to definition functionality, which is not readily available in an external editor
- setting breakpoints
- shortcut to insert template for function under cursor
- shortcut to display help for function under cursor
For those reasons, I usually end up using a combination of an external editor (taking advantage of Igor 7 external Editor support) and the internal editor. This is obviously not a big problem, but using a single editor would be smoother- just in case ;)

Talking of mixing editors, it would be nice to have Igor's editor optionally use spaces for tabs.

Thanks,
Fabrizio

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Indeed, the Igor editor is integrated into Igor in a way that no external editor could be!

The column-mode editing you link to appears to be an interesting way to change make a mass change. If that is how you use it, perhaps you could use the Replace All with the In Selection checkbox turned on. So double-click a word you want to change, use Edit->Enter Selection as Find, select the lines where you want the replacement to happen, Edit->Replace, enter a replacement word. Turn on In Selection and click Replace All. You will see that the new search highlighting will be restricted to the selection when In Selection is turned on.

When using an external editor, if you have a command for which you want help, copy the command name, go to Igor's Help Browser, Command Help tab and paste it into the Filter box below the list of commands. Not as convenient as Go To Help, but not too bad.

The Command Help tab also has a button, Copy Template. That gives you a reasonable way to get a command template to paste into the procedure you are editing in an external editor.

For Go To Definition, I sometimes paste a command name into Igor's command line just so that I can use the shortcut.

John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

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