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:

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 this operation involves the interpreter, it can be slow (but so is selecting Rope.Find and clicking Open in order to find out the arguments), especially the first time for a particular interface.

In the case of misspellings, spelling correction will take place according to your user profile. If confirmation is required, Yes No menu buttons will be posted in the corresponding viewer.

As described above, CTRL-NEXT is used as a "I'm finished with this, go on" in conjunction with CTRL-E abbreviation expansion. It deletes all of the fields that have default values. If there are any fields that have not been filled out that do not have default values, the first of these fields is selected and a message printed in the message window. Thus the user can use CTRL-NEXT to eliminate all fields with default values, and then proceed to fill in the remaining fields.

For convenience, CTRL-NEXT can also be used in other contexts involving forms. If the current selection is a placeHolder, CTRL-NEXT deletes the placeHolder and then does moves to the next placeholder.

When you (red) click save on a Tioga document, the system 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 your name (i.e. the name of the user that is logged in) appears, and if there is also a date. Stop searching at the first non-empty 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 separate CreatedOn, LastEditedOn comments). Otherwise, provided that at least one comment was seen, insert a new comment of the form "Last edited by: your name, date", following the last comment.

For example, the first few lines of the file CompatibilityPackage.df are:

If Andrew Birrell were to edit this file and click save, the file would look like:

But if Warren Teitelman were to edit the file and click save, the file would look like:

Note that this feature will never insert a comment unless one is already there, and will also never insert a comment at the top of the file. It can be disabled by including the entry UpdateLastEdited: FALSE in your profile (the default is TRUE), or can be bypassed for a particular file by clicking the save button with the blue mouse button, rather than the red.

A facility for automatically generating change log entries for documents that employ Tioga node structure is available through the ChangeLog menu button, which is added to the first menu line of all Tioga documents as a result of running NewStuffImpl.bcd. Red-clicking ChangeLog 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 form: "Edited on", the date, "by ", your name, 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 I edit the file PrintTVImpl.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 NewStuffImpl is loaded, unless you have an entry in your user profile of the form CreateChangesLog: FALSE. This log is kept on the file Changes.Log 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. Here is an example of such a log:

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. (Note: if you simply point and click in a viewer, you typically will obtain a character selection, rather than a point selection, unless you point at an empty node. One simple way to convert a character selection into a point selection is to simply type anything, e.g. a space.)

The viewers package allows you to load an existing viewer with a file while requesting that the current contents of the viewer be made iconic. This is accomplished by selecting the name of the file, and then right clicking get. NewStuff extends this feature to allow you to select an icon, and then right-click get in a viewer. This causes the icon to be opened in place of the viewer, and the viewer to be made iconic, i.e. the two are swapped. Similarly, selecting an icon and then middle clicking get will open the icon just below the viewer, and left clicking get will cause the icon to replace the viewer.