Other Customizations by You

There are a number of aspects of Multi-Edit that can be easily customized to your specific SAS or personal needs. Some of the possible changes (such as key assignments) you should make early so that you don't waste time remembering or become accustomed to the defaults. Others, such as menu and template changes, you should use the product awhile first so that you can identify your use patterns.

Don't like the default colors? Syntax highlighting is very useful (especially for spotting open comments or strings). You can change the colors of the keywords, and how they are grouped. You can also change the colors for comments, strings, symbols, and literal values. These changes are made in two places. Under the language definition ( Tools-Customize-Languages), the keywords are broken up into 4 groups. If you like the current grouping but don't like the colors or text attributes you can make changes in Tools-Customize-Colors. If you don't like the grouping, or want to include more keywords the changes are made inTools-Customize-Languages. There are special language and color definitions for each (log and sas), you must edit the correct one. You will have to select each of these from a list.

Syntax highlighting in Multi-Edit occurs over groups of items that are functionally different like text strings, comments, numeric values, etc. Select Tools-Customize and press the Colors button. Note the color template name in the upper left-hand corner of the dialog. This must be set to SAS to edit the color patterns you see when looking at a file with the extension "sas". There is a different color template for log files called LOG.

The scrollable list to the left contains an entry for each grouping that can have a separate color. If you have been to the language setup dialog you will have noticed that many of the items in the Syntax Highlighting group here represent values you could set there. The check box groups to the right will activate or deactivate for certain members of the "Editing" group. Some of the items in this group may have the highlighting turned off (such as Changed Text). The section below this relates to the language definition. In addition to specifying a color for each group, you can also set the Italics and bold features for all the items in the Syntax Highlighting group. It varies as to what you can set for the other groups. The checkbox group in the upper right corner of the dialog allows you to turn highlighting off or just off for the current line that your cursor is on.

Select Tools-Customize then press the Languages button, then select SAS or LOG from the list. Pressing the Edit button will bring up the dialog. The top 4 edit boxes list the keywords broken into functional groups. The keywords must be blank separated and alphanumeric only . Most of the keywords in the lists are in alphabetical order within their sub-groupings. If you feel a subset of keywords would be better grouped with another you can cut and paste from one list to another. The only restriction is that each list can have no more than 1500 characters.

If you would prefer a different key mapping Multi-Edit is happy to oblige. Select in Tools-Customize and press the Keys/Commands button. This gives you a list of every menu item available in Multi-Edit. The Multi-Edit native commands are grouped just the same as the menus are organized. The EZRTools;) stuff is located near the end of the list in the user defined operations group. The SAS command map is used with *.sas and *.log files. If you know where the command is on a menu, if it has a key assignment ( Cntl-Alt-f3 ) you can quickly look it up with the search feature. Just press the search button, select search by Primary key , click on the button next to the key Edit window and then press the desired key combination. This is also a great way to find out what keys are already in use. When you have found the command that you want to change the keycode for, select edit. You will be allowed to put in a new keycode (works the same as search).

You can add to and change any of the Multi-Edit menus and the menus provided with EZRTools;). The two menus Sas and Log, can be edited by selecting Tools-Customize and pressing the Menus button. You can add, remove, or rearrange items on the menus to your liking. You don't have to worry about removing an item and loosing it forever. The removed item is still on the command map, and can be re-added later. Menus can be up to 4 layers deep, but you need to build the lower level entries first so that Multi-Edit will allow you to add the command-less entry above them. The very first item in the command list is a separator bar. You can use this "command" to add separator bars to menus.

Both LOG and SAS files use the same template set. To change the templates, select in Tools-Customize and press the Templates button. You need to select SAS from the drop down list in the dialog. Some of the proc and function templates may have selections in forms or options not particularly suited to your work. You can change them by scrolling down the list of templates until the one you want comes up and is highlighted blue. The SAS templates are grouped by function, and ordered alphabetically within the group. To change templates just make the changes in the edit window to the right side of the dialog. You can cut and paste within this window. Many times it is easier to edit the template in a normal edit window, cut the results and paste them into the edit window in the template dialog.

Making your own templates up for specialized jobs can save lots of time. You can use text enclosed in back quotes to allow modifications to be made. You can place meta-commands in the text to position the cursor after each expansion. If an item of information needs to be repeated multiple times within the block of code then Prompt and Lastprompt meta-commands can be used. This is a great feature for adding repetitive code that contains slightly altered text. If you copy the template keyword into the paste buffer and cause the template to place the cursor on the line following the expansion, and use the Prompt meta-command adding blocks of code goes like this.

Cntl-v space type-the-prompted-for-text enter repeat.

If the blocks of code are 10 lines long you could place 100 lines of code down in just a few minutes. Let the bean counters figure that out.