Extending Cell Selections, OptionInspector stuff
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg12862] Extending Cell Selections, OptionInspector stuff
- From: Adalbert Hanszen <hsse at amath01.amath.zeiss.de>
- Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 00:28:05 -0400
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hi, MathGroup!
Mathematica 3.0.1.1 behaves differently from Mathematica 2.2.3 when
extending the selection of cells.
When extending a selection of grouped cells in Mathematica2.2.3, you
could not extend the selection beyond the limit of an enclosing group.
You could easily select the first cell, hold down the left mouse-key
and move the mouse cursor to the bottom or top of the window. Then the
screen scrolled down or up and the selection extended to the next
cell(s). If the upper or lower bound of the enclosing group-of-cells
bracket was reached, selecting more cells was stopped (however, the
scrolling continued, possibly scrolling the selection off screen, which
was not that nice. But then at least, you could easily thumb back with
the scrollbar, the selection was easily recognized from the black
bars).
When extending a selection of grouped cells in Mathematica3.01.1, you
can easily extend the selection to cells below or above the end of the
enclosing cell-group. This is annoying, since with modern display
hardware, scrolling is sped up very much and you are quickly far away
from where you wanted. But then, all cells in between are selected and
you can no longer thumb back until the black bars reappear.
Unfortunately the selection also switches between nesting levels
automaticly, which was not the case before. This new behaviour already
cost me unwanted deletion of subsequent cells, when I only wanted to
get rid of some (not all) Print or Out-cells below a cell, which I had
activated. I just did not notice, that I happend pass by some
subsequent Input cell and was already selecting the output of that
cell.
I think, the old behaviour was better than the new one and I am looking
for the right place (probably OptionInspector, but which of the many
selectable options?) to tell Mathematica3.0.1.1 to extend the selection
of cells the way Mathematica2.2.3 did it.
BTW: the OptionInspector has many choices which are not described in the
manual. I suppose, it depends on the system, on which Mathematica is
runnig. Therefore they are probably not in the "bible".
If there is not already a resource on this: What about putting together
all observations/playing-around-with-it results of them according to
the following scheme (I hope, the example below is correct. If not,
any remark on it is wellcome):
OptionName: AutoSpaces
Default: True
Other: False
Meaning: AutoSpaces introduces additional spaces for better
readability.
To save space, the spaces are narrower than other
characters,
even if a monospaced font is used. If you like to indent
Input manually, you better set AutoSpaces to False. Caveat:
not dangerous, but changing it in an notebook with much text
may shift something far to the right, if one switches from
True to False.
Contexts: say, if it works on global, notebook, cell or selected cell
level.
Applies to: Input Cells
Reflected in: here one might put the init.m, default.nb or whatever else
place, where the option is saved. It would also be helpful
to know the Mathematica-Expression generated from it (if
applicable).
Sometimes the places may be different, depending on the
context of the option.
See also: name alls Options, which do similar or related things or
have any cross-reaction with it. In this case I would
mention
AutoIndent.
Regards
Dipl.-Math. Adalbert Hanszen <hsse at amath01.amath.zeiss.de>