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6. Attributes

Ved operates in an ncurses environment, and is limited (somewhat) in the numbers of colors and character attributes it can use due to design decisions and limitations in ncurses. However, we don't really like those real busy screens ... so this suits us just fine.

The attribute color settings are set to ``nice'' defaults in the source file ``attrs.c'' when Ved starts up. You can change the ``niceness'' by editing the values in ``defs[ ][ ]'' in ``init_colors()''. However, it is probably better to do this in an RC file. For details, refer to Section 19.3.1.

In the editor characters are displayed in accordance with their setting though the the `character'' command. Each character is set to the attribute area and the printing characters. The setting for each character can be changed though an RC file enter. See Section 19.3.2 for details.

When Ved starts up the normally printable ASCII characters in the range $20 (SPACE) to $7e (~) and $a1 to $ff are set to display as a single character6.1. All other characters, other than Tab and End-of-line, are set to display as a 2 character hexadecimal value in reverse video. See the RC CharSet option, Section 19.5 for details on how to change this.

When blocks and other highlighted text is displayed in the editor Ved attempts to toggle the display between Editor_Highlight and Editor_Normal. If the display area attribute for a character is NOT Editor_Normal it will be displayed in Editor_Highlight. So, you could define a character to be displayed with the Dir_Menu attribute. When highlighting, this character will be displayed in Editor_Normal.

Pulldown menus are displayed in the same colors as the associated menu bar.

If you create an RC file with the Menu-options-Save Options command, the generated RC will have the current attribute settings with headers listing the available colors, areas, and other helpful information.


next up previous
Next: 7. Expressions and Values Up: Ved Text Editor Reference Previous: 5. The Mouse
2004-05-02