KEDIT Hints and Tips: An Introduction to the ALL Command

KEDIT's powerful ALL command lets you work with a subset of your file. The ALL command is one of the most popular of KEDIT's commands.

Suppose you are editing a very large file and buried in that file somewhere are just a few lines that have the particular piece of information you are interested in.

For instance, maybe you want to work with just the lines that contain "Chicago" or all of the blank lines in the file or the names of two variables in your program such as "init_value" or "total_value".

From the command line, issue the ALL command in this format:

ALL /string/

For example,

all /Chicago/ or all ~blank or all /init_value/ | /total_value/

Now you are working with a subset of the file consisting of only those lines containing the character strings you specified. Most editing operations will affect only that subset of your file. (The File Save and Actions Sort menu items and the FILE, SAVE, and SORT commands are the exceptions.)

For instance, you could delete only those lines with the command

DELETE ALL

or you could change some text in only those lines with the command

CHANGE /oldtext/newtext/ ALL *

or you could mark a box block to pick up columns from just those lines and then move or copy the block to another file or to the clipboard.

To once again work with all the lines of the file, you can either enter the command

ALL

or you can toggle back and forth between all the lines of the file and the subset of lines by using the bottom toolbar buttons

Show All Lines

Hide Excluded Lines

Here is what the bottom toolbar looks like:

If you don't have the bottom toolbar showing on your KEDIT screen, page to the bottom of this topic for directions on how to display it.

Similar to the ALL command is the Edit Selective Editing dialog box which is in the Edit menu dropdown list.

To select a subset of your file with Edit Selective Editing, specify the string involved in the Match What edit field and press the Matching Lines button. When you want to see all of the lines of the file again, press the All Lines button.

How To Display The Bottom Toolbar

You can display the bottom toolbar by selecting Options from the menu, and then selecting Options SET Command. Now you should have the SET Command dialog box on the screen and you can select TOOLBAR from the list of options, and then click on the box beside the Display Bottom Toolbar box so that a check appears in it. If you want the bottom toolbar to always be displayed, also click on the "Save Settings" button.

For more information about the ALL command, check out All about ALL, a technical article with tips and techniques for users of the ALL command. The ALL command is also discussed in the KEDIT for Windows User's Guide Chapter 8, ``Selective Line Editing and Highlighting''