The three lines vanish from the display. A marker appears by
fileMenu, indicating that it has hidden children. (Depending
on which platform you are using, the marker might be a right-pointing
triangle, an exclamation mark, or some other symbol.)
Hiding items is independent of contracting/expanding them. Once an item has been hidden, it will stay hidden until it is revealed.
If you have many things hidden, Reveal Hidden Items redisplays them all. If you want finer control, you can reveal only a few hidden items.
The three hidden lines reappear, returning the display to its appearance as shown in ***.
You may hide particular instance variables, so that they do not show for any object.
Note that the editMenu is another CwMenu, and so it has an armBlock, configureBlock, and disarmBlock. But they are hidden, because their names are hidden.
This is convenient for reducing clutter when exploring complicated
structures. It is often the case, e.g. when exploring
VisualAge parts, that there are a large number of instance variables, many of
which are not of interest at a given time.
The hidden lines may be unhidden as in step 7. However, this can only be used to reveal hidden items for objects which have already been expanded. The Snooper will continue to hide the named instance variables any time it subsequently expands an object. If you want to make the three instance variables be visible by default again, use the Edit Automatically Hidden Names selection in the Hide menu.