EditorComforts is a package that enhances various functions of the Tioga editor in the Cedar environment. These extensions are:

When you left click Save on a Tioga document, EditorComforts will search for a comment containing a date and your name, and if found, will automatically update the date. The algorithm used is as follows: start searching at the beginning of the document looking at all comments, where a comment is either a tioga node with the comment property, or any line beginning with -- or //, (i.e. this feature also works equally well for documents that have not been converted to Tioga node structure). In each comment, look and see if the user's name appears, and if there is also a date. Stop searching at the first non-comment node. If a comment of the appropriate form was found, update the date of the last such comment (so that user can have a separate CreatedOn comment). Otherwise, provided that at least one comment was seen, insert a new comment of the form user, time, following the last "Last edited by:" comment, or following the last comment if there is none. If the user profile has an entry EditorComforts.LastEdited, then the contents of that entry is used instead of the user name for the comment, thereby allowing nicknames or full names. If the user profile has an entry EditorComforts.UpdateLastEdited: FALSE, then this feature will be disabled.

Clicking the (C) button causes a Xerox copyright notice to be inserted after the first non-blank line of the file being edited. Clicking (C) will also update such a notice if it does not contain the current year. A copyright notice is recommended for all files that are the property of the Xerox Corporation. The copyright message is

A facility for automatically generating change log entries for documents that employ Tioga node structure is available through the Log menu button, which is added to the first menu line of all Tioga documents as a result of running EditorComforts.bcd. Left clicking Log will cause the system to create a change log entry at the end of the document being edited. The entry consists of a Tioga node of the same form as the "last edited" comment, followed by a nested node beginning with "changes to:", followed by a list of the items changed. PlaceHolders for comments are inserted following each item. (Filling in these comments is optional: any placeHolder in the change log entry that is not filled in will be automatically deleted when the file is saved.)

The changed list is generated as follows: for each Tioga node that has been edited, add an entry to the changed list, if one does not already exist, corresponding to the first (most tightly bound) type declaration that this node is under. Only consider type declarations which contain a block as part of its definition (i.e. local variable declarations of a procedure that are edited do not rate separate entries, local procedures do). If there is no such declaration, e.g. the edit is to the DIRECTORY list, or to some expression in the start code, etc., use the highest node that is not a comment. If there is such a declaration, and it is local to some higher declaration, indicate that declaration also when printing the change entry.

For example, if User edits the file Grumble.mesa by changing: (a) several of the DIRECTORY clauses, (b) the IMPORTS list, (c) the top level declaration for the type UnderLongString, and (d) the procedures EnsureInit, PutCardRope, and innerPut, the latter two of which are local procedures, the change log entry that would be produced would look like:

A facility for generating a log of all of the files that you save during a session is automatically enabled when EditorComforts.bcd is loaded when there is a user profile entry EditorComforts.ChangesLog: name or EditorComforts.SessionLog: name This log is kept on the file name, which is created when it is first needed. Each time you save a file, the date, file name, and changes log entry that was inserted in your file via the facility Updating Changes Log discussed above, if there is such an entry, is added to this log.

CTRL-E can now be used following any expression whose value is of type procedure, record, error, signal, etc., i.e. any type whose syntax involves square brackets and named fields, to generate an appropriate "form" for that expression. For example:

The user can move back and forth among the fields using {NEXT} (Spare2) and {SHIFT-NEXT} in the standard fashion. When finished with the form, he can type CTRL-NEXT which will have the effect of deleting any fields not filled in, plus advancing the caret to just beyond the terminating ']. For example:

==>

i.e., typing "r" filled in the first
ROPE field, and typing "key" filled in the second
ROPE field, and {CTRL-NEXT} deleted ", pos1:
INT ← 0, case:
BOOL ← TRUE" and moved the caret to after '].

Note that CTRL-E can also be used to construct forms when typing to the interpreter in a work-area (since typescripts are now editable).

Another useful application is typing CTRL-E following an expression whose value is a procedure type. The will cause the insertion of a comment describing the arguments and return values for the procedure type, and then an appropriate form for the procedure body. For example:

==>

Since CTRL-E expansion involves the interpreter, it can be slow, especially the first time for a particular interface.

Whenever a Tioga document is searched via the Find, Word, or Def menu buttons, the target of the search is saved. If the target for this particular search, i.e. the current selection, is empty (i.e. a point selection), then the previous target is used instead. This enables searching for Foo, deleting it, and then searching for the next Foo by simply clicking the menu button again. It also enables searching for a particular target, changing the input focus in order to type something somewhere else, for example, to obtain a new viewer and load it with a particular file, and then searching again without having to reselect the target.

Vanilla Tioga provides a button in the Places menu called "Position". EditorComforts extends the functionality of this button.