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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 removed⁴. As a general rule, the commands available in navigation mode are also available in the edition mode prefixed with C-c and with a control sequence C-. Thus, n, which in record navigation mode jumps to the next record, becomes C-c C-n in the record edition modes. The exceptions to this are the bindings c (rec-cmd-compile) which becomes C-c C-k and h (rec-cmd-show-summary) which becomes C-c M-h.

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

R ¶

M-x rec-edit-record

Edit the record being navigated.

T ¶

M-x rec-edit-type

Edit the record set being navigated.

B ¶

M-x 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 ¶

M-x 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.