KEDIT Hints and Tips: The Bottom Toolbar

A useful feature of KEDIT for Windows that many people are not aware of is the bottom toolbar:

Copy Block Move Block Overlay Block Delete Block Shift Block Left Shift Block Right Uppercase Block Lowercase Block Left Adjust Block Right Adjust Block Fill Block Set Bookmark Go to Bookmark Hide Excluded Lines Show All Lines

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.

The Tool Buttons

These buttons (which don't actually blink back at you from within KEDIT!) are two of the most useful buttons on the bottom toolbar. They let you toggle back and forth between two views of your file.

The Show All Lines button shows you the normal view of your file with all of the lines displayed.

The Hide Excluded Lines button shows you only the lines of the file that you have specified earlier by using either the ALL command or the Edit/Selective Editing dialog box.

For information about using the ALL command or the Selective Editing dialog box, see KEDIT Hints and Tips: The ALL Command

The Tool Button

One of my favorite buttons is the Fill Block
Fill Block button. If you mark a block and then press this button, you will be prompted to enter a "fill" character. For instance, if you press the space bar to enter a blank character, your block will be filled with blanks.

There are three basic kinds of blocks you can mark in KEDIT:

a stream block by dragging mouse button 1
a line block by pressing the CTRL key and then dragging mouse button 1
a box block by pressing the ALT key and then dragging mouse button 1

You can fill any of these blocks with a character using Fill Block .

The Shift Left Shift Right Uppercase Lowercase LeftAdjust and RightAdjust Buttons

To use these buttons, just mark a block and start experimenting. They do just what their names imply that they do.

For example,

Mark a box block by first pressing the ALT key and then dragging with mouse button 1. You should now have a box block marked on the screen that looks like this:
Now click on first the RightAdjust button and then the LeftAdjust button. If you have selected data that is in a column, you should see it change from being right-adjusted to left-adjusted and vice versa.

The Copy Move and Overlay Buttons

To use these buttons, you need to mark a persistent block.

For example, do the following:

Mark a box block by first pressing the ALT key and then dragging with mouse button 1. You should now have a box block marked on the screen that looks something like this:
Click anywhere on the KEDIT screen with mouse button 2. You should now have a drop down menu that looks like this:
Select the "Make Persistent" option which will make your block stay marked until you unmark it using this same popup menu.

Now you can work with the buttons on this toolbar that move, copy, delete, overlay, shift, leftadjust, and right adjust blocks.

For instance, you can overlay a block of data from one place to another using
the Overlay Block button.

Put the cursor at the location where you want to overlay the block and then click on the Overlay toolbar button. Note that "overlaying" a block is different than "copying a block". When you overlay a block, the data underneath where the block is being overlayed is covered over. When you copy a block, the data underneath where the block is being copied is shifted over to the right and is not covered over.

More information about KEDIT's toolbars can be found in the KEDIT for Windows User's Guide Chapter 5, ``Menus and Toolbars''.