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3 Edition modes

The navigation mode described in a previous chapter is mainly intended for browsing recdata and doing changes at the record level: editing the contents of a field, adding or removing fields, etc. In order to perform broader changes, such as adding/deleting record descriptors, records or comment blocks, the user must enter into one of the “edition modes”.

There are three edition modes, covering different areas of the recfile: record, record type and buffer. When an edition mode is entered the buffer is set in read/write mode, it is narrowed to the desired area and any embellishment used in navigation mode is removed1. As a general rule, the commands available in navigation mode are also available in the edition mode prefixed with C-c. Thus, C-c n would make the cursor to jump to the beginning of the next record.

The following commands are used to enter into one of the available edition modes from the navigation mode.

R     (rec-edit-record)
Edit the record being navigated.
T     (rec-edit-type)
Edit the record set being navigated.
B     (rec-edit-buffer)
Edit the buffer.

After doing modifications in the buffer, the user can go back to navigation mode by using the following command.

C-c C-c     (rec-finish-editing)
Finish the current edition and return to navigation mode. If a syntactic error was introduced in the edition activity then the error is reported in the echo area and navigation mode is not entered.

Footnotes

[1] Exceptuating font-lock