A Quick Tour

The purpose of this manual and a "quick tour" is to provide an overview of many of WinEdt's features. For detailed description you will have to consult the on-line help and the help associated with numerous dialog interfaces.

Right-clicking on different portions of WinEdt's controls brings up context popup menus which allow you to chose commands and options associated with the area of your right-click. For example, the following (predefined) context popup menus are associated with the right clock on the Menu/ Tool Bar area, Status Line, and the Left Margin portion of a document, respectively:

Note that each popup menu contains a context sensitive Help and Appearance items. These two items can be executed if you want a quick help or if you would like to change Menu/Tool Bar, Status Line or Bookmark's functionality and appearance, respectively.

The following Popup Menus are by default associated with the context response to the empty MDI client area and MDI Document with and without selected text, respectively:

Right-clicking on a misspelled word brings up the Spell Checking Dialog with a list of suggestions:

Many more Popup Menus are defined in the Menu Setup Dialog. In particular, the Invisible Popup Menus can be assigned a shortcut and they are being used for double-shortcut interface to certain commands. WinEdt's Help Explains the details.

WinEdt's Status Line responds to the clicks inside each panel. In particular, with a click on the associated panel it possible to turn certain features on or off: Wrap, Indent, Insert/Overwrite, Line/ Block (column) Selection Mode, Auto Spell... Clicking on the question mark (at the beginning of the status line) brings up a short help explaining the meaning of individual panels.

In the default settings a panel "--src" can be used to toggle the parameter that is passed to MiKTeX's TeX compiler and it determines whether or not the resulting dvi file is equipped with SRC specials which allow you to perform Forward and Backward DVI Search. In WinEdt's Help Index you'll find the topic on SRC Specials and Dvi Search which explains the details.

Dialogs in the Options Menu

WinEdt Options Menu contains a series of Dialog Interfaces that can be used to change or fine-tune the default behavior of WinEdt. It is strongly recommended that you take a quick tour and take a look the Preferences, Settings and Appearance Dialogs.

Admittedly, there is no sharp line between the aspects of WinEdt that are customized in each of the above interfaces (certain Tab Pages in the Preferences Dialog, such as Colors could easily belong to the Appearance Dialog while the Bookmarks Tab Page in the former dialog could be by the same argument moved in the Preferences). For now take a look at these interfaces and you'll get some idea what can be customized (should the default behavior not meet your standards and preferences, which, by the way, are always subjective):

The Help in each dialog will guide you if you need more explanations.

Document Settings

If you want to check or change certain settings pertaining to your current document check the Document Settings Dialog in the Document Menu:

Project Manager

WinEdt has a full featured Project Manager. Project management commands are placed in the Project Menu:

Disciplined users may want to take advantage of this functionality and organize their work into Projects. For Each Project WinEdt creates a "project file" (*.prj). This file contains the information about up to 999 recently opened files that are stored in a file list and the last ten items are available in the bottom of the File Menu. The project file is also used to store the current position and the position of any set bookmarks for each document in the file list as well as all document attributes (eg. current Wrapping, Spelling, Line or Block Selection Mode, etc...).

You may have noticed that the name of the Project File is displayed in the Status Line. It can also be verified in the Project Manager Dialog in the Project Menu:

Users that want all their work in a single Project may not want to bother with projects at all. The Default Project is "%b\WinEdt.prj". If you decide to work on a single project you may want to remove the "Project" panel from the status Line. This can be done in the Appearance Dialog (Disable the Option "Show Custom Info B"):

More options pertaining to Project Management, File Lists, etc... can be found in the Preferences Menu:

The Help in the above dialogs provides the description of all available options...

Translation Tables and International Characters

WinEdt's Translation Tables can be used to convert your text while it is being read or written (and more). You can also perform a translation which could be interpreted as a multiple replace in your current document. The most common need for translations arises because of international characters. For example, working with TeX's international characters in a Windows environment does not always make sense, since one would prefer to type the accented characters or umlauts directly from the keyboard and see them as such. Also, WinEdt's dictionaries and spell checking feature are designed to work with ANSI (Windows) character sets and do not support TeX's notation for international characters.

Translations are defined through Settings| Translations Dialog:

On-line Help in Settings Dialog contains all you have to know to set up your own customized translation tables.

Document Modes and Submodes

WinEdt supports different Modes (groups of settings) for different types of files. For example you may want to use WinEdt to write your TeX documents as well as e-mail messages, HTML and C++ files... Different tasks require different type of settings (eg. Wrapping, Indenting, Highlighting, File Format). Furthermore, you may be writing in more than one language and would like WinEdt to use different dictionaries for different documents.

Modes were introduced to implement functionality that makes WinEdt an even more flexible and versatile editor. Modes are completely user-definable and except for a predefined mode "Default" that should not be changed they can be added or removed in Preferences| Modes Dialog. If you are using WinEdt more or less for one task you don't have to worry about Modes. However, if you are planning to use WinEdt for more than one type of task or language you should do the following:

(1) Invent a short description for documents of a certain type (eg. TeX). Please note that this description is displayed in the status line and, in order to fit in the available space, should not be too long.

(2) In the Preferences| Modes Dialog: enter a line containing the Mode Name followed by "|" and the file extensions (types) filter (eg. *.tex;*.ltx).

So far it is not clear how could this possibly affect any settings. It is really simple and we'll return to it in a moment. Let me first address the question how WinEdt determines the Mode for a particular Document.

You will notice that WinEdt's "Open" and "Save As" Dialogs contain this list in the "Files of Type". When you open a file through the Open Dialog you can simply determine its Mode by selecting the appropriate file type from the list of all defined modes. Some conversions (eg. ASCII or TeX to UNIX) can also be done while saving the document. Binary and Soft modes are not compatible with the rest and changing the mode from ASCII to Soft or Binary requires a conversion. Since the result might not be what you anticipated WinEdt will prompt you to confirm the change.

Files can also be opened through Drag and Drop, DDE or from within Windows Explorer. How does WinEdt determine the modes for these files? WinEdt simply scans all available Modes and matches the first one whose file filter contains the file type of the file to be opened. For example the file "Paper.tex" is opened in TeX mode because this is the first (and only) mode containing "*.tex" in its file filter. Similarly "WinEdt.dic" is opened in ASCII mode.

If no file filter in the currently defined modes matches the file type (extension) then WinEdt opens the file in the first (non-Default) mode that contains "*.*" in its file filter. This is also the mode applied to (empty) new documents.

The predefined Mode "Default|*.*" has a special meaning and is used to tell WinEdt that the actual Mode should be determined from the file extension. If you are rationally using file types (extensions) most of your documents can be opened in the "Default" mode. Although you can remove this Mode it is best to leave it as the first entry in your Modes Settings.

Once the Document is Opened you can explicitly change its Mode through "Project|Document Settings" Dialog which can also be activated by clicking the field displaying the current Mode in the status line.

Conditional Check-Boxes and Mode Filters

Although we now know how WinEdt determines the Mode it is not obvious how this affects any settings.

The answer is in the so-called Conditional Check Boxes (Options) which are enabled only for certain Modes.

For example in "Preferences| Defaults" Dialog you'll find over 20 such Options pertaining to the Editor's behavior and different file formats.

When the check-box is enabled Modes on the left of "|" are admissible ones and those on the right are disabled. If the Filter is empty then the Option is either enabled or disabled for all Modes (a faster equivalent to specifying a wildcard "*" as a filter). If the Option is not checked then the filter is ignored (a faster equivalent of "|*").

When Modifying the Options in Preferences| Defaults Dialog you should first click the text associated with the check box in order to have the associated Mode Filter Displayed. Then you can either Modify the filter or change the value of the check-box.

IMPORTANT: Making changes to the default settings does not affect the documents that are already opened or those that are stored in the project's file list. The defaults only affect a document when it is opened for the first time. After that such attributes become local to each documents (they are stored in the file list). Consequently they have to be modified through the Document Settings dialog (for each document present in your project's file list):

Alternatively, you can close all documents and clear the file list in the Project Manager Dialog in order to re-build the file list with the new default attributes. Since this can be quite a nuisance it is recommended that you make the initial settings suitable for your purpose:

Considering that most settings Dialogs contain conditional Check-Boxes it is possible to define more Modes than anyone would care to know about. On the other hand even the most demanding users will probably find that they are using WinEdt for at most a few different tasks and it is relatively easy to set up the appropriate mode (Highlighting, Spelling, Active Strings, Translations, Wrapping, Indenting...). All Settings can be explicitly changed for a particular document. For example, Auto Wrapping and Spelling can be toggled by a mouse click on the appropriate fields in the Status Line; and other settings can be modified through "Project| Document Settings" Dialog.

Modes and Sub-Modes

Modes are a powerful feature that makes WinEdt more versatile. However, changing a document mode always resets all Default values and affects Highlighting, Translations, Global Switches, etc... While sometimes this makes sense (eg. changing file mode from TeX to ASCII) it is very annoying when, for example, you would like German Dictionaries applied to the current document. Of course one could define Modes "TeX DE", "ASCII DE" and make consistent changes through all Preferences, Settings, Highlighting, Dictionary Manager - definitely too much work to make it worth...

That's why WinEdt also provides sub-modes. If the Mode Name is preceded by ":" WinEdt simply appends the Mode's Name to the existing Mode and changes only those attributes (defaults) for which the sub-mode is explicitly present in the associated Mode filter. For example, saving a TeX document as UNIX would result in the Mode "TeX:UNIX" and only line terminators are affected by this change. This makes sense since file format is the only setting specific to the UNIX sub-mode, and such a document should still be treated as a TeX document.

This is made possible because WinEdt compares the document mode with the filter entry only up to a length of filter entry! Thus "TeX:UNIX" Mode matches the filter specification "TeX" as well as "UNIX".

This also makes it possible to setup multi-lingual settings.

For example, if you plan to write English and German TeX documents you should define sub-modes ":UK" and ":DE". All TeX specific attributes of modes "TeX:UK" and "TeX:DE" are automatically preserved because these file modes both match the filter "TeX". However, in the Dictionary Manager you should define two sets of dictionaries (English and German) and specify the filters "UK" and "DE" for the English and German dictionaries (respectively).

If, for example, you want auto spell checking to be by default enabled for English TeX documents but not for German ones you should specify the appropriate filter in Preferences| Defaults Dialog (Spell Mode) to "UK" or "*|DE". The second filter "reads" as: all but German ones. Of course, Auto Spelling for each document can be quickly toggled by clicking on the "Spell" panel in the status line...

Note that, for example, "TeX:UK" can be further combined with a sub-mode ":UNIX". Since the panel displaying document modes in the Status Line has a fixed width you shouldn't use too long strings for Mode names if you want to view the whole information in the status line.

On UNIX Format (LF)

Windows uses CR+LF as a line terminator while UNIX files have LF character as a line separator. WinEdt does not particularly care and can transparently handle both formats. By default WinEdt is configured so as to detect and preserve the file format. Explicit changes (for each document) can be made through the Document Settings Dialog.

Depending on whether you want a feedback about UNIX file format displayed in the Status Line you have two choices:

• If you enable the option "LF (UNIX)" at the end of the options in the Preferences| Defaults dialog and specify UNIX as a mode filter then WinEdt will automatically append ":UNIX" to file's mode if the source has UNIX format.

• If, on the other hand, you don't want any such information in the status line then simply disable the above option. WinEdt will preserve file format and you can verify and/ or change by the options (Radio Buttons) in the Document Settings Dialog| EOLN.

The first choice is the implemented in the default settings.