ne's manual
ne's manual
In various situations, ne needs to ask you to choose one of several
strings (where ``several'' can mean a lot, even hundreds). For this kind of
event, the requester is issued. The requester displays the strings in
as many columns as possible, and let you move with the cursor from one
string to another. The strings can fill many screens, which are handled as
consecutive pages. Always in the spirit of knowledge reuse, all the
navigation keys work exactly as in normal editing. This is true even of
custom key bindings. Thus, for instance, you can move to the top or bottom
of the list with CONTROL-^ (in the standard keyboard
configuration).
As with the input line (see The Input Line), you can confirm your input
with RETURN or escape the requester with F1 (or the ESCAPE
key, or whatever has been bound to the Escape command).
A special feature is bound to alphabetic characters: they move you on the next entry starting with the letter you typed. The search is case insensitive, and continues on the first string after having passed the last one.
An example of requester is the file requester that ne issues whenever a
file operation is going to take place. In this case, pressing RETURN
while on a directory name will enter the directory. Note also that, should the
requester take too long to appear, you can interrupt the directory scanning
with CONTROL-\. However, the listing will likely be incomplete.
Note that there are two items which always appear in the file listing:
`./' and `../'. The first one represents the current directory
(and can be used to force a reread), the second one the parent directory
(and can be used to move up by one level).
Another example of requester is the list of commands appearing when you use the
Help command. (Note that even the help text appearing on the screen is
handled by the requester---your ``choice'' of a line in the text is of course
discarded, but the flexibility of the requester allows to gain in code size,
since no separate code is necessary in order to display the on-line help.)