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Editing

Part of the basic xlincks model is that one is always in an editor. Everything that is visible can also be edited directly, without any explicit mode shift.

A user always works with a composite object via some view of that object. The aim in xlincks is to allow the user to work with composite objects as whole entities rather than requiring a conscious awareness of the individual components. The style of editing in a composite object is based on the text editor emacs. Many of the commands are the same as in emacs and editing ranges over the entire composite object, just as if it was a single file being edited.

As much as possible, familiar emacs commands perform the same way in xlincks as they do in emacs. For example, commands such as ctrl-a take you to the beginning of the line, ctrl-e goes to the end, ctrl-d deletes a character, and so forth. A complete list of these commands is given in section 4.3.

Some additional editing capabilities arise because of the underlying structure of the representation (e.g. making a new section requires a new type of command as it has no equivalent in emacs). Also, ordinary emacs operations such as deleting a part of a document may require reorganisation of the underlying structure of the database. We refer to these two classes of editing operations as structure editing All of these LINCKS-specific commands are prefixed by meta-l (for LINCKS). For example, the command to show the history of a composite object is meta-l meta-h. Again, a list of these commands is given in section 4.3.

The xlincks approach to structured editing is to give as much automated support as possible to the user in maintaining and creating the underlying database structure, without requiring that s/he explicitly indicate what database structure is desired. Naturally, there are some cases where the user needs to understand how the system makes decisions in order to be able to carry out the desired operation. However, our intention is that in cases where intentions should be clear (for example, to another person) the system will react as desired without the user having any deeper understanding of the system.



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Martin Sjolin
Mon May 29 19:53:45 MET DST 1995