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87 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
87 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
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Marks (the lite edition)
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------------------------
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So, were you ever reading this huge 300-pages specification heavily
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cross-referencing itself, jumping around and getting a headache when looking
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for the place where you stopped reading the last time?
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Were you doing something similar in C code, but praising *vi* for document
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marks?
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ELinks can do them, too! For vim non-users:
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What it is?
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~~~~~~~~~~~
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When you place a "document mark" (just "mark" from now on), you place an
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_invisible_ anchor at the current position in the document. You can place
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several such marks --- each mark is identified by a single character (any
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reasonable character will do). Then, you can just happily browse around
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aimlessly (but see below) and when in the same document again, you can
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return to any of the marks in the file again. That will restore your
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position in the file at the time of placing the mark.
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You can place a mark by the "m" key followed by the mark character. You can
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go to a mark by the "'" (apostrophe) key followed by the mark character.
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E.g., you can place a mark named "a" in the file by pressing "ma", then
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return to it anytime later by typing "'a". You can of course change those
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shortcuts at any time to anything you wish in the keybindings manager.
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Short summary: you can place a mark (e.g. 'z') in a document by pressing
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"mz" and then go back to it anytime later by pressing "'z".
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Restrictions
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~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Currently, only A-Za-z characters are valid marks.
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Only one mark named "a" (or anything else) may exist at a time, so if one
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puts a mark "a" in a first document and set another mark "a" in a second
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document, ELinks will simply replace the former one.
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ALL the document marks are always local to the document. I.e. the vim text
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editor has an extension that makes the capital-letter marks to be global to
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the whole program and going to such a mark will make it to open the right
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document. This is not implemented in ELinks _yet_.
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Contrary to vim, ELinks doesn't support numbered marks (jumping to the last
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n documents in history) nor the special "'" mark (jumping to the last mark).
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Yet.
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There is no way to get a listing of all marks set in a document. Yet.
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Marks lifespan
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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I already hinted something about another restriction regarding aimless
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browsing. The lifespan of document marks depends on rather ill-defined and
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(for an average mortal) mostly non-deterministic technical conditions.
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Generally, marks _always_ survive when not moving away from the document or
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when moving only in the session history (and unhistory). That means, if you
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go back and the "unback" to the document, you will find your marks safely in
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place. If you follow a link from the document (or typed an address to the
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Goto URL dialog) and then go back (by pressing the right arrow or through
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the File menu), your marks are safe too. These are in fact by far the most
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common usage cases for the marks, so most of the time it will just work as
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you expect. That's a good news.
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The bad news is that in all other cases, nothing is guaranteed. It might
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work if you get back to the document by any other means (by following some
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link or typing its address to the Goto URL dialog), or it might not. It
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might be possible to achieve two instances of the document inside a single
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ELinks, each with its own set of marks. However, again, generally it will
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work as expected - this paragraph serves only as a disclaimer in cases it
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doesn't. Don't rely on it.
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Marks never survive over ELinks restarts. If you quit your ELinks completely
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and run it again, the marks you placed will be no more. No exceptions. Well.
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In some cases, it *might* appear that they survived, but that just means you
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did not quit your ELinks _completely_ --- if you run multiple ELinks
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instances under a single user on a single system, they "join" together and
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you must quit (or kill) them all to get rid of the damn thing. But that's a
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different story.
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