ChSciTE Documentation

Getting Started

ChSciTE can be launched by running the command chscite. In Windows, ChSciTE can also be conveniently launched by clicking its icon shown in Figure 1 on a desktop.

Figure 1: A ChSciTE icon on a desktop in Windows

Figure 2: Get on-line help on how to use ChSciTE.

Editing and Executing C/Ch/C++ Programs

Text editing in ChSciTE works similarly to most Macintosh or Windows editors such as Notepad with the added feature of automatic syntax styling. ChSciTE can hold multiple files in memory at one time but only one file will be visible. ChSciTE allows up to 20 files to be in memory at once. Rectangular regions of text can be selected in ChSciTE by holding down the Alt key on Windows or the Ctrl key on GTK+ while dragging the mouse over the text.

There are two panes in ChSciTE, the editing pane and the output pane. The output pane is located either to the below of the editing pane or on the right. Initially it is of zero size, but it can be made larger by dragging the divider between it and the editing pane.

The Options | Vertical Split command can be used to move the output pane on the right of the editing pane.

With Ch installed on the machine, the edited program can readily be executed in ChSciTE like in other IDE such as Microsoft Visual Studio. The source files are executed interpretively without compilation. The output from the program are directed into the output pane.

The First Example of Editing and Executing a Program with Output.

For example, open a new document, type:

#include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello, world!\n"); return 0; }

as that document's text.

The same program hello.c in CHHOME/demos/bin/hello.c, where CHHOME is the home directory for Ch such as C:/Ch in Windows for C:/Ch/demos/bin/hello.c, can also be loaded using File | Open command.

The program should now appear coloured with syntax highlighting as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Program hello.c

Figure 4: Save program hello.c

Perform the Tools | Run as shown in Figure 5 to execute the program hello.c.

Figure 5: Executing program hello.c

Instead of performing the Tools | Run command, pressing function key F5 will have the same effect of executing the program.

The output window will be made visible if it is not already visible and will show:

>ch -u hello.c
Hello, world!
>Exit code: 0

Figure 6: The output from executing program hello.c

ChSciTE understands the error messages produced by Ch. To see this, add a mistake to the Ch file by changing the line

printf("Hello, world");


printf("Hello, world";


>ch -u hello.c
ERROR: missing ')'
  ERROR: syntax error before or at line 4 in file hello.c
  ==>:    printf("Hello, world\n";
  BUG:    printf("Hello, world\n"; <== ???
ERROR: cannot execute command 'hello.c'
>Exit code: 1

Figure 7: The error line in output from executing program hello.c

Click the line in output with red color in Figure 7, the line with incorrect syntax will be highlighted as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Finding the error line in output from executing program hello.c

While it is easy to see where the problem is in this simple case, when a file is larger the Tools | Next Message command can be used to view each of the reported errors. Upon performing Tools | Next Message, the first error message in the output pane and the appropriate line in the editing pane are highlighted with a yellow background, The caret is moved to this line and the pane is scrolled if needed to show the line. ChSciTE now looks like in Figure 8.

If command execution has failed and is taking too long to complete then the Tools | Stop Executing command can be used.

On Windows, ChSciTE defaults to execute tools as command line programs. Executing a GUI program in this mode results in that program being run without displaying a window. The command.subsystem option can be used to define tools that run in GUI mode. The default subsystem, 0, is for command line programs, 1 is for programs which create their own windows, and 2 is for using the ShellExecute call. To run a GUI program such as OpenGL and Windows, use Tools | Launch Ch Shell command to launch a Ch shell. Run the GUI program in this shell.

On GTK+, the default subsystem 0 executes the tool and waits for it to finish, redirecting output to the output pane and subsystem 2 executes the tool in the background.

Setup Paths and Finding Commands in Ch

Figure 10: Open the local Ch initialization startup file for editing.

One can also add this directory to the function file search paths by the statement

The Second Example with Input.

The same program C:/Ch/demos/bin/scanf.c can also be loaded using File | Open command.

During execution, this code should ask the user to "Please input a number" and then cause the system to output "Yout input number is" and the number that the user inputted.

Figure 11: A program with input from the user.

Figure 12: Executing the program with input and output.

The Third Example with Plotting in Ch.

Figure 13: A plotting program using fplotxy().

Figure 14: The output of the plotting program.

Figure 15: A plotting program using plotxy().

Figure 16: A plotting program using fplotxyz().

Figure 17: The output of the plotting program using fplotxyz().

Command Parameters and Prompting

ChSciTE has 4 properties $(1) .. $(4) which can be used to run commands with changeable parameters. To set the parameter values, use the View | Parameters command to view the modeless Parameters dialog which shows the current values of these parameters and allows setting new values. The accelerator keys for the main window remain active while this dialog is displayed, so it can be used to rapidly run a command several times with different parameters. Alternatively, a command can be made to display the modal Parameters dialog when executed by starting the command with a '*' which is otherwise ignored. If the modeless Parameters dialog is already visible, then the '*' is ignored.

The Fourth Example with Command Parameters.

Figure 18: A program for handling command parameters.

Figure 19: Setup command parameters.

Figure 20: Setup command parameters.

Figure 21: Executing the program with command parameters.

Buffers

ChSciTE has 20 buffers each containing a file. The Buffers menu can be used to switch between buffers, either by selecting the file name or using the Previous (F6) and Next (Shift+F6) commands.

When all the buffers contain files, then opening a new file causes a buffer to be reused which may require a file to be saved. In this case an alert is displayed to ensure the user wants the file saved.

Sessions

A session is a list of file names. You can save a complete set of your currently opened buffers as a session for fast batch-loading in the future. Sessions are stored as plain text files with the extension ".ses".

Use File | Load Session and File | Save Session to load/save sessions. You can turn on/off "last session autoloading" using ChSciTE properties variable "save.session".

By default, session management is turned on.

Loading previously saved session will close your currently opened buffers. However you will not loose your edits, because you will be asked to save unsaved buffers first.

Opening a specific file from command line overrides "save.session" variable state. When you start ChSciTE loading a specific file from command line last session will not restore even if "save.session" variable is set to "1". This makes "save.session" safe to use - you will never open a couple of files when you are trying to open just one, specific file.

Languages Understood by ChSciTE

ChSciTE currently is able to syntax style these languages (* denotes support for folding):

• C/Ch/C++*
• CSS*
• HTML*
• Make
• SQL and PLSQL
• TeX and LaTeX
• XML*

Language settings are determined from the file extension but this can be changed by selecting another language from the Language menu. The language menu can be changed with the menu.language property.

Find and Replace

ChSciTE has options to allow searching for words, regular expressions, matching case, in the reverse direction, wrapping around the end of the document. C style backslash escapes which are listed in the command line arguments section, may be used to search and replace control characters. Replacements can be made individually, over the current selection or over the whole file. When regular expressions are used tagged subexpressions can be used in the replacement text. Regular expressions will not match across a line end.

ChSciTE supports basic regular expressions with tagging.

Keyboard Commands

ChSciTE uses the default key bindings defined in Scintilla, so keyboard commands in ChSciTE mostly follow common Windows and GTK+ conventions. All move keys (arrows, page up/down, home and end) allows to extend or reduce the stream selection when holding the Shift key, and the rectangular selection when holding the Shift and Alt keys. Some keys may not be available with some national keyboards or because they are taken by the system such as by a window manager on GTK+. The user.shortcuts setting may be used to assign a key to a function. Note that Home key behaviour is changed by the vc.home.key option. Keyboard equivalents of menu commands are listed in the menus. Some less common commands with no menu equivalent are:

Abbreviations

To use an abbreviation, type it and use the Expand Abbreviation command or the Ctrl+B key. The abbreviation is replaced by an expansion defined in the Abbreviations file. You can open the Abbreviations file with a command in the Options menu and add abbreviations.

Each line in the files looks like "abbreviation=expansion".
The abbreviations names can have any character (except perhaps control chars, surely for CR and LF), including high Ascii chars (accented chars).
Names have properties files limits: they cannot start with sharp (#) or space or tab (but can have spaces inside); and they cannot have '=' character inside.
Abbreviations names are limited to 32 characters. It is probably enough for abbreviations...

An expansion may contain new line characters indicated by '\n' and a caret position indicated by the '|' character. To include a literal '|' character, use '||'.
Some simple examples are included in the distributed Abbreviations file.
When expanding, the names don't need to be separated from the previous text. i.e. if you define '‰' as '&eacute;', you can expand it inside a word.
If a name is the ending of another one, only the shorter will ever be expanded. Ie. if you define 'ring' and 'gathering', the later will see only the 'ring' part expanded.

Folding

ChSciTE supports folding for many languages (see the list of languages understood by ChSciTE for more information.) Fold points are based upon indentation for C and on counting braces for the other languages. The fold point markers can be clicked to expand and contract folds. Ctrl+Shift+Click in the fold margin will expand or contract all the top level folds. Ctrl+Click on a fold point to toggle it and perform the same operation on all children. Shift+Click on a fold point to show all children.

Encodings

ChSciTE will automatically detect the encoding scheme used for Unicode files that start with a Byte Order Mark (BOM). The UTF-8 and UCS-2 encodings are recognized including both Little Endian and Big Endian variants of UCS-2.

UTF-8 files will also be recognized when they contain a coding cookie on one of the first two lines. A coding cookie looks similar to "coding: utf-8" ("coding" followed by ':' or '=', optional whitespace, optional quote, "utf-8") and is normally contained in a comment:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
For XML there is a declaration:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>

For other encodings set the code.page and character.set properties.