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The text shortcuts panel

The text shortcuts panel

Select Shortcuts... (Options menu, Shift Ctrl S) to open the text shortcuts panel. Text shortcuts can improve your editing speed considerably for certain computer languages, but only for certain ones; especially languages such as HTML and LaTeX.

A shortcut consists of a `trigger' and an `expansion'. Type the trigger in a text window, and hit Escape with the cursor exactly after the trigger. The trigger is removed and replaced with its expansion.

The expansion may contain plain text, escape sequences in octal (\120 or hexadecimal \xa6) for special characters, newlines (\n), tabs (\t), a tilde (~), and a question mark (?). The tilde is not part of the expansion, but indicates the point where the cursor should be put after expansion. A question mark will cause a box to pop up on shortcut expansion. What is typed in the box gets substituted for every occurrence of ? in the expansion. To get a normal tilde, question mark or backslash, use \~, \? and \\.

The best way to learn how to use shortcuts is to look at the example sets (browse through the predefined sets for the different modes as defined in the shortcut panel). The supplied shortcut sets only serve as examples.

Every text mode has up to four shortcut sets, which are saved in separate configuration files, so that they can be shared between different text modes. Shortcut sets are saved automatically on Save options (Options menu). When a predefined shortcut set is changed, the suffix .preset is removed from its name.


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