Guidance for learning
To become familiar with MetaEdit+:
| 1) | Read
Chapter 1 to familiarize yourself
with the MetaEdit+ environment and its basic functionality. This part of the
manual is best read while sitting at your computer so that you can experiment
with the features of MetaEdit+ as they are described in the
text. |
| 2) | Read
Chapter 2 get a more detailed
overview of the environment and its features and
capabilities. |
| 3) | Skim
the components chapters (Chapters 3, 4 and 5), once you have completed the two
first chapters and gained some experience with MetaEdit+. These chapters contain
in-depth information about each of the tools that you used in the tutorial: you
do not need to know everything here, but it is useful to have a basic idea of
what information is covered
where. |
| 4) | For
more detailed description about the repository solution and meta-metamodel of
MetaEdit+, see Chapter 6. |
MetaEdit+
is a dynamic product under continual improvement, and there may occasionally be
some differences between what is described in the manual and what is found in
the current version. The latest versions of the manuals are available from
MetaCase.
Conventions
Throughout the manual, you will find special notes and
comments which point out important features and characteristics of the MetaEdit+
environment. These notes are printed in
italics and are marked by an
arrow (→) in the left margin. The steps required for performing
MetaEdit+’s various functions are indented and numbered: 1), 2), 3)
etc.
List dialogs and keyboard
search
MetaEdit+ makes extensive use of list dialogs for selecting
among elements. To quickly select a known element in a list, simply type the
first few letters of that element’s name when the dialog opens. This moves
the cursor to the first element whose name begins with those letters. Pressing
Enter will choose the current framed element, closing the dialog. Pressing Space
selects the current framed element, and resets the typed buffer, so you can
start typing a different name. You can also double click an element to choose it
and close the dialog.
To move to the next matching element, press Alt+Down, or
Alt+Up/Home/End for the previous/first/last match. To include a Space in the
search string (or other reserved character like Enter, or *, +. – for tree
widgets), hold down Alt while you type the character. Searching like this also
works in the focused widget elsewhere: lists, trees, property tree sheets and
Table Editor (but not other multi-column data sets).
Some dialogs allow multiple selections: use Shift-click or
Shift-space to select a contiguous section of the list, and Control-click or
Control-space to select or deselect individual elements. Again, a double click
first performs the selection operation (modified by Shift or Control keys), and
then closes the dialog.
The Windows user interface standard prevents resizing of
modal dialogs, which can make life difficult if all the necessary information is
not visible in the default size. To help in such situations, MetaEdit+ includes
a triangular resize corner at the bottom right of most dialogs. By clicking and
dragging the resize corner, you can resize the dialog window to be
larger.
