Edible Characters and Shifty Spaces

by Dick Estel

I maintain my list of compact disks in a Write Stuff file, with two columns, artist and title (i.e.):

Gin Blossoms                       New Miserable Experience
Big Sandy and His Flyright Boys     Lost in the Fog

When I set up the file several years ago, I did not allow enough room for long artist names, but I
realized I had a little extra room on the right margin. I could improve the file by moving all the titles over
about 10 spaces.

There are several ways to accomplish this in TWS. The most tedious is to cursor to each line and type
in 10 spaces while in insert mode. Since I have around a thousand titles, this idea did not appeal to me.

I could also tab to the beginning of each title, and press [SHIFT][RUN/STOP], which would insert
three blank lines. I could then tab to the desired position 10 spaces over and press
[CONTROL][SPACE], which would pull the text back to the cursor position. This also seemed to be
a formidable task.

I could also do a SEARCH and REPLACE, which would be partially successful. I could SEARCH for
10 spaces (or any other reasonable number), and REPLACE with 20 spaces. This would correct all
lines where there were 10 or more spaces between the end of the artist name and the beginning of the
title. Following this, I could use any of the other methods to shift the lines that had not been moved
(those with less than 10 spaces). In retrospect, this would have been my best choice.

As the words "in retrospect" imply, before I thought of method three, I implemented method four, as
follows:

I used the program's EAT and RESTORE capability to insert 10 spaces on each line. First I typed a
number of spaces at the bottom of the file, then I pressed [CONTROL] E followed by pressing C 10
times. This placed 10 spaces in the buffer.

I then went to each line, tabbed to the beginning of the title, and pressed [CONTROL] R. This inserted
ten spaces, shifting the following text over. As you can guess, even this was not a fast or pleasant task,
and I accomplished it in several sessions spread over a couple of weeks.

The actual sequence of key presses in this procedure was as follows:

F5        Moves the cursor to the beginning of the next paragraph
[TAB]     Tabs to the pre-set position at the beginning of the title
[CONTROL] R Inserts the 10 spaces
(Repeat as needed until brain fatigue sets in or the job is finished.)

The point of all this, besides giving the appearance of an informative article on TW Stuff, is to discuss
the EAT CHARACTER feature, which is mentioned in the manual, but which does not appear on the
command line in TWS 64.

It has one useful feature that eating words, sentences and paragraphs lacks: When you use any of those,
a return character which follows the block of text will be "eaten" along with the text. The period at the
end of a sentence will also be picked up. (The paragraph, of course, is always followed by a return.)
This may cause remaining paragraphs to be run together, and you will have to remember to add a return
if needed. And the return character will be restored wherever you dump the text, which may or may not
be what you want.

If you want to "eat" a word that's at the end of a sentence and restore it elsewhere without the period
or return character, you can use the EAT CHARACTER feature to capture only the letters of the
word.

Notice that I also slipped in instructions on the use of [SHIFT][RUN/STOP] to insert blank lines, and
[CONTROL][SPACE] to bring the text back to cursor position. I use these features with virtually
every text file I create, other than perhaps a quick letter. Here's an example of how and when:

When you insert into an existing file at a point where there is a lot of text below the insert point, text
entry slows down (due to the computer having to move all following test one character ahead). If I am
going to insert several sentences, I press [SHIFT][RUN/STOP] several times to insert a dozen or so
blank lines. I then turn insert mode off (by tapping [CONTROL] i). The new text is typed over the
blank space that I have inserted, and the existing text does not have to be shifted down. When I'm
done I press [CONTROL][SPACE] to bring the old text back to the cursor position.

Another interesting note: In TW Stuff, when you tab from the beginning of an existing line, the cursor
moves PAST the existing text to the tab setting, which is just what I needed for method 4. In a PC
word processor a tab in front of existing text is INSERTED, and the text moves over. Another case
where Commodore is actually better than the high priced spreads.

From "The Interface," newsletter of Fresno Commodore User Group