Contents of Article


Standard Windows Dialogs

Scrolling

Cursor Positioning

File Manager Context Menus

Keyboard Key Simulation

Tab Switching

Tab Closing

Text Selection


Introduction


The original ISPF 3270 terminals had no mouse and SPFLite was initially designed to operate in the same manner, using only the keyboard. But because SPFLite is a Windows program and has access to the mouse, SPFLite provides mouse support to enhance user productivity in the following areas:


Standard Windows Dialogs


At various times SPFLite will utilize standard Windows dialogs to prompt for information. When this is done, these dialogs allow you to use the mouse to make selections and button choices. Examples of this are:

    • File selection menus.
    • Font selection menus
    • Color selection menus
    • Printer selection menus


Scrolling


If scrolling is activated (see "Options - General") the mouse wheel may be used to scroll the text window in an edit session, or a list of files in the File Manager. The number of lines scrolled by each mouse-wheel click is set in Options. 


Scrolling is normally done vertically. Holding the Shift key while using the mouse wheel causes horizontal scrolling. (Think: "shift = sideways")


Holding the Ctrl key while using the mouse wheel will cause a 4 X speedup of the scrolling action when you want to scroll long distances within a large text file. This is called Turbo Motion, or Turbo Mode scrolling.


If you want to do horizontal scrolling in Turbo Mode, you can hold the Ctrl and Shift keys at the same time while using the mouse wheel.


Cursor Positioning


During file editing, the left mouse button can be clicked anywhere within the screen area to move the cursor quickly to that location, and will then optionally issue an action mapped to an SPFLite keyboard key, if that action is configured in the KEYMAP settings.


File Manager Context Menus

While working in File Manager, if you right-click on one of the line items, a small Context menu will appear with the most common Line Commands listed. Simply Left-click on one of the displayed items to invoke it.  Note you must be Right-clicking on a non-blank character in the line or your click will be ignored.


Keyboard Key Simulation


As well as positioning the cursor on the screen, the left, middle and right mouse buttons can be used to (after the positioning) simulate the entry of a single keyboard key. Note that with keyboard mapping, this can launch powerful commands and macros. See "Keyboard Customization and Keyboard Macros" for details. 


Tab Switching


Similar to the SWAP command for tab switching, you can left-click on any file tab, or File Manager tab, to directly switch the active edit session or activity to that tab.


Tab Closing


When a file tab is clicked with the right mouse button, it closes the file in the same way that the END command does. The PROFILE option AUTOSAVE is handled in the same way as is done for the END command. A right mouse click on the File Manager tab displays the next higher directory level.


Text Selection


SPFLite provides a number of features where the mouse is used in text-editing operations. You can find more information in the article Word Processing Support.


During Edit, the left mouse button can be held down and dragged over text to select it as a block. The selected text will be displayed on the screen in inverse video to highlight the area you have selected. 


If text is double-clicked while the mouse is not moving, a span of characters will be selected that are delimited by the current WORD characters and/or the end of the line. This operation performs a ‘word select'.


Once selected, the highlighted text can be placed on the clipboard using the keyboard (Copy) command (normally assigned to Ctrl-C).  If you have selected the incorrect data, simply release the left mouse button and start over again.


In addition, keyboard functions exist for (Cut), (Lift),  (Paste), (BlockPaste) and (CopyPaste), any or all of which could be assigned as action commands to the mouse buttons. (CopyPaste) provides the functionality of the Windows QuickEdit feature, which will copy text if any is highlighted, and will paste text if there is no active highlighting. 


The selected data area is restricted to what is visible on the current screen. You may not scroll the screen while selecting text with the mouse. 


If you want to select more data than is visible vertically, you can use the Exclude command (X) to conceal lines you are not interested in, or use keyboard text selection (shifted arrow keys) which will allow screen scrolling.


Any keyboard function like (Upper) that operates on a selected-text area, will now also operate on a single character if the cursor is within the data area of a line, even if the data at that cursor position not highlighted. This makes it easier to do things like capitalize a single letter, or any other similar keyboard function.


Note: You may also use the T/TT line command to select text across multiple lines, which is useful when the number of lines involved is large. See T / TT - Select Text Lines for more information.

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