Selections

The object pane of each window has an insertion cursor that identifies a location in the text either between two adjacent characters or at the beginning or end of the text. The insertion cursor's position is indicated by a caret and is the focus of textual editing operations such as character insertions and deletions. Insertion-cursor motion commands move the cursor through text in different directions and increments. The insertion cursor can also be repositioned by mouse actions.

Each object has a structural selection that identifies a subphrase of the object. The structural selection is indicated by underlining and is the focus of structural edit operations such as template insertions, syntax-preserving transformations, and structural cut-and-paste. Structural-selection motion commands move the structural selection through the text of an object according to its abstract rather than its textual structure. The structural selection can also be repositioned by mouse actions. Because the structural selection of a buffer of syntactic category TEXT is always the entire buffer, it is not underlined.

There is one textual selection containing a substring of characters. The textual selection is denoted by highlighting and is the focus of both inter- and intra-application textual editing operations such as cut-and-paste. A textual selection is created by dragging or multi-clicking the mouse; it can also be created by operations such as search-and-replace operations where it is used to highlight the target string.

The insertion cursor, the structural selection, and the textual selection are coupled in the sense that commands directly changing one of the three often indirectly change the other two. Details are given with descriptions of the different navigation commands.

Commands for selections are:

• select-all
• select-word