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The Semware Editor

In Development or Planned

v0.27.1   PROTOTYPE
16 Apr 2025
TSE v4.49e upwards works best, all TSE variants

This is a PROTOTYPE of a future tool.

It gives an impression of the tool-to-be, but it still lacks some necessary capabilities and has known bugs.

eHelp displays an editable .ehelp file like TSE's built-in help.

It comes with tools to create a .ehelp copy of TSE's built-in help and/or to build your own TSE-like help for anything.

Syntax:
      ExecMacro("eHelp [ helpfile [ (sub)topic ] ]")

There is no integration between any help files.

Within a .ehelp file we can select its internal links.

Typical use would be

  • to provide TSE-like help for a tool,
  • to provide an independent alternative to TSE's built-in help,
  • to provide TSE-like help for anything else.

The result will have almost all the features of a built-in TSE Help page, as well as some advantages regarding indexing and searching:

  • Index advantages:
    • The index starts with a "first letter index".
    • Topics and their subtopics are cross-linked:
  • Search advantages:
    • A jumped-to subtopic or search result will be hilited.
    • A new "SearchResults" page (still in development) will look like TSE's "View Finds" page.
    • The help's "Back" function will also go back to the SearchResults page.

History: The new tool's work name was recently changed from "sHelp" to "eHelp". There was an old eHelp tool, which ambitiously tried to support concurrent help files for TSE itself, the unfinished development of which was paused in 2023, which will not be continued, and which is now replaced by this new much simpler eHelp tool, which will only support one independent help file at a time.




Remaining high-level steps:

  • A minimum viable product (MVP) (The very basics, usable but limited).
  • Versions with extra features.

Low-level steps towards an MVP:

  • Must:
    • The main still missing functionality is the ability to search the help outside the current topic.
    • Further improve documentation.
  • Could:
    • Maybe at this stage already make eHelp capable of replacing TSE's built-in help with a provided .ehelp file?
      Otherwise it will not have an immediate, broadly usable, unique selling point (USP).
      Default this will block access to TSE's built-in help, and I have not yet thought of a quick, ad-hoc way for the user to get around that block when they wish to.
      I also do not want to do this until I have a vetted version of my own tsehelp to offer.




v0.27.1   16 Apr 2025
Only updated the ehelp.s file.
Added the help's search menu, but currently you can only select the options for searching in the current topic.

v0.27   14 Apr 2025
Updated all 4 .s files.
Calling eHelp without parameters now gives a proper message.
Added the "Help on Help" topic to generating tsehelp.ehelp.
(In TSE's built-in help "Help on Help" is an exception: It does not come from the .hlp files.)
Made eHelp_Hlp2eHelp call eHelp_CreateIndex after generating tsehelp.ehelp.
Made eHelp_CreateIndex save the newly-indexed .ehelp file.
Improved the documentation.

v0.26.3   10 Apr 2025
Only updated the eHelp.s file.
Fixed: A pop-up topic (like "Info->INTEGER") no longer shows the "Info->" part in its window title.

v0.26.2   9 Apr 2025
Only updated the eHelp.s file.
Fixed: Using a down-key in an Index now works properly.

v0.26.1   8 Apr 2025
Only updated the eHelp.s file.
Partially fixed: Using a down-key in an Index in some cases skipped a lot of lines. Now it skips only one line.
Improved: In the index: In subtopic-lines their topic is now justified against the right side of the help window. It looks much better.

v0.26   6 Apr 2025

Added the eHelp_CreateIndex tool, which can (re)create an "Index" topic in an existing .ehelp file.

It differs in a few details from TSE's own Index:

  • All topics and subtopics are indexed.
    At the top of eHelp's tsehelp's Index you will immediately notice some links to subtopics that TSE's own Index does not show.
  • Subtopics are cross-indexed with their topics:
    • They get their own entry with a parenthesized reference to their topic.
    • They also get an indented entry below their topic.
  • The index starts with an index of the first letters of (sub)topics.
    For example, to find "OneWindow" in the index, you can first select "O" in the letter index, and then scroll down.

Known minor issues:

  • Using the arrow keys in the index can go too fast.
  • The index does not show "()" behind functions.

v0.25.3   30 Mar 2025
Tiny documentation improvements.
Improved eHelp so that compiling it does not result in notes.
Set the debugging-check to FALSE to not waste performance.
Documented how TSE's debugger can be used on eHelp.

v0.0.0.2
10 Feb 2025
Windows GUI TSE v4 upwards

This tool shows a selectable font and its settings in a 16 x 16 character table.

The characters are shown as TSE shows them based on TSE settings.

The TSE session is temporarily shrunk to simplify a side-by-side comparison of different fonts and/or settings using 2 or more TSE sessions.

To do:

  • Add font size as a selectable setting.
  • Above the table, instead of the font and settings we chose, show the font and settings that Windows actually set based on our request. Or both.

v1.0.1.4
31 Jan 2025
TSE v4 upwards, all variants

9 Nov 2024 a user made a request, that I interpret as that eList should not always start at line 1, but instead on a list line based on the source's current line, like a search with the "v" option does.

v1.0.1.1
As requested eList now starts at the source file's current line.
When "zooming in" on a longer search string by typing a character, the list's new current line is set at or as close as possible above the list's previous current line.
It no longer uses the clipboard, which reduces memory usage, increases speed, and leaves the clipboard intact.

v1.0.1.2
Disabled the main menu and help line during eList, which loses us nothing and gains us an extra line of list space
Added numerous progress indicators, useful for processing big buffers.
Emptied the temporary helper buffers when finished to improve memory usage.

v1.0.1.3
Two huge speed optimizations:

  • A search will stop and restart when you type another character.
  • When the search string is empty or matches an empty string, the source buffer itself is listed instead of making and listing a copy.

v1.0.1.4
Fixed the major bug in v1.0.1.3, that when eList had just been started and the first typed character was <Escape>, then the current buffer became empty.

Git bug

While editing, the Git macro sporadically makes TSE ignore typed keys.

This is a very elusive and hard to confirm bug, because it almost never occurs.

My main suspect is the Git macro updating the git status of the current buffer.
My suspicion is, that the macro's Dos('git.exe … status -s …', _RUN_DETACHED_|…) call makes TSE ignore keyboard input for a fraction of a second.

My first goal is to find a reliable way to reproduce the bug.

Aside, thinking ahead, I found this way out of the box possible solution/work-around, that also might make Git usable in the Console variant of TSE as well.
Currently Git "works" in the Console variant of TSE, but with user-unfriendly updates of the current buffer's git status.

Uniview bug

7 Nov 2024 a user reported that Uniview sometimes only displays a too short part of the front of a line.

Tests confirm, that this typically happens for longer lines with lots of "Unicode characters".

A review of the Uniview extension makes me want to do a structural improvement of the implementation and documentation.

The upcoming eHelp project would also benefit from this, because the plan is to use UTF-8 for the new help file format.

Math

I found my excuse for writing a Math macro that can do floating point operations: I will need it for the planned Picture macro to scale pictures.

To make optimal use of TSE's native capabilities and limitations, it makes sense to limit a floating point number to MAXSTRINGLEN, MAXLINELEN, or a TSE buffer size (255, 32000, or some value below 3.9 GB).

I cannot think of an excuse to make it longer than MAXSTRINGLEN, and the longer lengths would decrease calculation speed per digit. Tell me if you do know of such an excuse.




Alternatively, for others, if you do not mind installing new executables in Windows, then there is this package from Eckhard Hillmann on Semware's website: FppPack_1_00.zip .

From reading its documentation I gather it provides high-level functionality in TSE, like a calculator-like expression-evaluator shell and a (block?) sum function, and that it provides basic math operators and functions by calling (closed-source) executables from the Windows command prompt.

Picture

This will be a tool and extension that lets us open a representation of a picture in TSE.

On 14 Dec 2024 I published XmasGift , an experiment in showing a picture in TSE.

A little more research showed how to show a representation of "any" picture in "any" version of any TSE variant.

The use of the word "representation" is very deliberate.

On the one hand Windows GUI TSE v4.2 upwards can typically show hundreds by hundreds of pixels in 16,777,216 colors.

On the other hand it might be even more actually useful what this extension can do in a non-graphical Linux server/terminal, in which Picture will at most be able to show a picture as 80 by 25 pixels in 16 colors or less.
Even an impression of a picture could be real added value in such an environment.

v0.0.0.1
12 Dec 2024
TSE v4 upwards, all TSE variants

Nota bene: This extension has no functionality yet, that is not already present in the Unicode extension.

Done:

  • Identify a opened file's Unicode encoding if it has a byte order mark (which is rare).
  • Simplisticly display the result with a message.

Todo:

  • Identify an opened file's Unicode encoding or code page for all other cases.
  • Display a pretty result somewhere.
  • Give a signal when the Unicode encoding / the code page does not match the user's default.
  • Make it configurable which signal types are used.

Research into 1-byte code pages suggests to me, that it is probably possible to in a useful way detect the three most used ones:

  • Code page 437: Windows prompt, English (United States).
  • Code page 850: Windows prompt, Other.
  • Code page 1252: Windows GUI, All. (a.k.a. "ANSI")

Code pages exist for Unicode too:

  • Code page 65001: UTF-8
  • Code page 1200: UTF-16LE
  • Code page 1201: UTF-16BE
  • Code page 12000: UTF-32LE
  • Code page 12001: UTF-32BE

Tentative conclusion:
One separate "code page detector", that detects both Unicode and the three most used 1-byte code pages, seems like a good plan.
This limited functionality should work in all TSE variants.

UniConv

UniConv will be a newly written ASCII/ANSI/Unicode conversion tool.

It will have none of the interactive and responsive capabilities of the Unicode extension, and will purely focus on the conversion of character encodings.

If it can do a file-to-file conversions without loading a file into TSE, then it will be able to do much larger conversions, and users will be able to load much larger Unicode files. That does require a rewrite of the old code from Unicode.

Deprived from screen interaction, it would be nice if it could be started in these ways:

  • From TSE as a macro to convert a string, (line?,) buffer, or file.
  • From the command line as a macro.
  • From the command line as an executable.

Unicode

There will exist a critical macro load order dependency between the existing Unicode extension and the future BrowseMode extension below.

(Henceforth in short referred to as Unicode and BrowseMode.)

This requires Unicode to be updated to do its part in enforcing adherence to this dependency.

To be able to test this well, I am first going to try to finally fix the following technical debt.

Unicode is too big to be debugged in TSE's macro debugger.

(TSE's macro debugger starts but malfunctions for too big macros.)




Considered Unicode optimizations:

  • Obsolete code:

    Unicode contains flawed, default disabled macro code for displaying the current character's real Unicode form in the the top-left corner of the screen.
    This is a remnent from before UniView extisted.
    Hopefully this can simply be deleted.


  • UniList:

    Unicode contains macro code for displaying a list of all Unicode characters, for optionally selecting one, and for inserting it into the text.
    Hopefully this can be split-off into a separate macro, perhaps named UniList.


  • UniClip:

    Unicode contains macro code for copying, cutting and pasting TSE ANSI text to and from a Windows Unicode clipboard.
    Hopefully this can be split-off into a separate macro, perhaps named UniClip.


  • UniConv:

    Unicode contains macro code for displaying Unicode text in an ANSI format, and for converting texts between ASCII, ANSI, and the major Unicode formats.
    For a long time I have wished to split the conversion macro code off into a separate macro, perhaps named UniConv.
    Hmm, now that I am thinking about this, there are a lot of arguments in favor of UniConv:

    • It would reduce Unicode's macro code.
    • Its use could be shared by Unicode and UniClip.
    • I already have other macros that currently use macro code copied from Unicode: They too could call UniConv instead.
    • UniConv could be given the capability to convert "unlimited" file sizes.
    • TSE could edit much larger Unicode files for two reasons:
      • Currently Unicode uses at least twice a file's size in memory for the conversion.
      • If they mostly contain Western-European languages, then UTF-16 and UTF-32 files will shrink 2 and 4 times respectively when converted to TSE's ANSI.


BrowseMode

23 Oct 2024 a user published their wish list for TSE, which included a wish for a "Write protected edit error".

I already needed to update my old "BrowsMod" extension, which helps to fulfill that wish.

I decided to completely rewrite my old "BrowsMod" extension into a new "BrowseMode" extension.

The old "BrowsMod" extension can still be found on Semware's "Classic" website.

The new "BrowseMode" will extend the old capabilities and add a new one.

The extended capabilities are, that it will automatically activate TSE's browse mode once for:

  • Read-only files.
  • Buffers with names containing user-configured strings.
    You can use this to automatically put an opened file in browse mode if its name contains a certain string.
    For example, if a file exists in a certain directory, or on a certain drive or network share.

The new capability regards the following.

  • In browse mode TSE itself often already gives a warning if you try to use a function that would change text, for example duplicating a line or pasting a block.
    However, in browse mode TSE does nothing if you simply type text.
    The new extension can give you three types of signal for typing in browse mode: A sound, a shortly shown pop-up message, or a warning that needs to be acknowledged.




Status 28 Nov 2024:

  • All stated functionality has been programmed.
  • I dare not publish a provisional version until I have also added enforcement of the macro load order of BrowseMode and Unicode.
    A wrong macro load order opens the door for a not-attentive user to save a mutilated Unicode file.
    For example, if BrowseMode sets the browse mode for a Unicode file before Unicode can convert it to ANSI, then a mutilated file is loaded into TSE, and it would be horrible if the user would save it.
  • Macro load order enforcement between BrowseMode and Unicode requires that Unicode will be improved too.
  • There will be the minor annoyance, that executing BrowseMode via the "Execute..." menu in order to configure it will also change the macro load order of BrowseMode and Unicode.
    This will disable BrowseMode until TSE is restarted, which will restore the macro load order.
    A solution of sorts that I found, is to offer a public "BrowseMode -> setup" procedure, like the "cuamark" macro has, which can be accessed via TSE's "Macro -> Show Loaded" menu, and which does not require a TSE restart afterwards.
  • I want to add the browse mode optimization, that for a group of rapidly typed characters just one signal per configured signal-type is enough.

v4.0.0.7
11 Mar 2024
Windows TSE v4.50 rc 18 upwards (to be expanded),
Linux TSE v4.50 rc 18 upwards (not expandable).

"DirList41" is the development version of the future "DirList" v4.1.

New so far:

  • In Windows DirList is now default independent of its environment's language settings.
    This is achieved by retrieving link targets with Windows functions instead of dir commands.
    This is a major step forward, even if it did create new loose ends.
    Example loose ends:
    - Link targets starting with weird prefixes.
    - The Windows functions and the dir command each do not retrieve some of the other's details. The now default Windows functions do not retrieve some details of the link type. So I will still have to apply the dir command too for those languages for which the dir output can be interpreted.
  • Gained a small but significant speed optimization by optimizing BigInt.
    The access status column is now an access error column. Therefore when there is no error, "ok" is replaced by "-". When sorting this sorts all access errors together.
    The "no link" indicator was changed from "." to "-". It subjectively looks better, and "-" is in my TSE WordSet, which helps accessing the column.
    DirList's speed was increased again by only retrieving link targets for the link types that have them: junctions and symbolic links.
    The --alllinktargets parameter generates the old list.
    The --folowlinks parameter makes DirList list the child objects of directory links again. This is not recommended.
  • Links are no longer followed.
    This greatly reduces the run time and list size, and linked subdirectories are no longer counted multiple times in a common parent's directory size.
    The following of links will later become a non-default option.
  • The link type column was condensed to be smaller.
  • The column for TSE accessility is now a string indicating a reason.
  • A link indicator (Linux) or type (Windows) column was added. Windows has a lot of link types.
  • Windows: For junctions and symbolic links the link type and the link's target is now shown. It is shown between square brackets after the name, like "dir /al" does.

Still todo for DirList v4.1:

  • Lots of (hopefully small) loose ends.

WordWrap
No versioning yet
23 Jun 2024
TSE v4 upwards

This considered extension will replace, change and extend TSE's WordWrap functionality.


Summary of main differences with TSE's wordwrapping:

  • A paragraph can also be indicated by an indented first line, a bullet point, an enumerator, a multi-line comment, a block of consecutive single-line comments, and HTML tags.
  • Wordwrap scope and state is maintaned per buffer.
  • Default wordwrapping is OFF.
  • When turned ON it keeps wrapping the current paragraph, and turns OFF again when the cursor leaves it.
  • A broader scope can be specified by the user, but then other paragraphs in the same buffer only start being wordwrapped when the user changes them.
  • Right margin "0" means "the window width".

Detailed points being considered:

  • The type of wordwrapping will depend on whether the type of the current buffer is a "text buffer" or a "program/data buffer".
  • Here a "text buffer" means a buffer with an extension for which no comment-syntaxhiliting is defined, and all other buffers are of type "program/data buffer".
  • For a "program/data buffer":
    • Wordwrapping is default off.
    • The user can toggle wordwrapping between these two values:
      • Off: No wordwrapping is done.
      • On: If the cursor is in a wordwrappable block, then the block is wordwrapped and keeps being wordwrapped until the cursor leaves the block.
    • A wordwrappable block is a multi-line comment, a block of consecutive single-line comments, or text between HTML tags.
    • Instead of "On" the extension could show the type of wordwrappable block it recognizes.
  • For a "text buffer":
    • Wordwrapping is default off, unless persistence "File" applies.
    • The user can cycle wordwrapping through these persistences:
      • None: No wordwrapping is done.
      • Paragraph: The current paragraph is wordwrapped and keeps being wordwrapped until the cursor leaves the paragraph.
      • Buffer: As "Paragraph" plus the same for other paragraphs in this buffer. For switched-to paragraphs wordwrapping starts when the user makes a change.
      • File: As "Buffer" plus for this file it persists across TSE sessions.
    • Wordwrapping will honor TSE's left and right margin settings.
      When the right margin is 0, wordwrapping will use the width of the editing window.
  • A paragraph is a piece of text in a "text buffer" delimited by:
    • An empty line.
    • An indented line at the start of the paragraph.
    • The start of a bullet point.
    • The end of a bullet point.
  • Bullet points can have levels: A bullet point can contain bullet points.
  • Wordwrapping "text between HTML tags" will only be done for text between tags that contains no other tags, other than a few excepted tags.
    Such excepted tags: <strong>, <em>, <br>.
    <br> will act as a wordwrap delimiter.
    Text between <pre> tags will not be wordwrapped.
  • The extension will show TSE's "W" indicator in the status bar when a block or paragraph is actively being wordwrapped.
  • Probably: Recognize other tag extensions than ".html" and ".htm".
    It is not uncommon to encounter .xml files where the whole file is in 1 line. While the xml structure would need to be reformatted by another program, it might become this program's task to wrap the lines inside tags.
  • Maybe: If the "Status" extension is installed, then it could (optionally) be made to show which type of wordwrapping is active.
  • Maybe: Change the background color for an actively being wordwrapped paragraph or block.

Notes:

  • Semware and I mainly use a "-" as a bullet point.
    Other seen bullet points are "*", "+" and "ú".
    The "ú" is shown as a bullet ("∙") in some OEM character sets. TSE's Help is shown using the system's OEM character set.
    In Windows GUI TSE's ANSI character set, characters 149 ("•") and 176 ("°") could be bullet characters too.
  • I use bullet points inside comments, so it makes sense to me that there they should be wordwrapped too.
  • The text of the "Expr" macro has two different occurrences of when to ignore "bullet points".
  • Examples of how to wordwrap bullet points.
    Not like this:
      Groceries: - The red laundry detergent
    but like this:
      Groceries:
      - The red laundry detergent
    And not like this:
      Groceries:
      - The red laundry
      detergent
    but like this:
      Groceries:
      - The red laundry
        detergent
    (Are my clothes real? Do I want to find out and take the red laundry detergent, or belay my suspicions and take the blue one?)
  • I would like to recognize and support enumerators.
    For example "1", "1.1", "a.", "a}", "(1)", etc.
    But probably not ones that use roman numerals.
    Note that enumerators either have their own line or prefix the first line of a paragraph.
    Enumerators impact wordwrapping in 2 ways:
    An enumerator is a paragraph delimiter.
    If an enumerator prefixes the first line of a paragraph, then it counts as whitespace regarding its paragraph's indentation.
  • Importing and exporting wrapped text.
    Text is wrapped per paragraph.
    Paragraph recognition differs between TSE and Word, for example.
    In TSE a paragraph is recognized by a blank line or by an indented or outdented first line. This is an existing setting.
    In Word a paragraph is recognized by "the enter key".
    If you copy a text from Word to TSE, then each Word paragraph becomes a single line.
    This implies, that also functions are required to wrap/unwrap a buffer or block of text that was/will be imported/exported from/to some other applications.


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