Text Formatting

The EditControl has text formatting support to layout its contents. Common text formatting techniques like WordWrap, Indentation-Outdentation, Outlining, Content Dividers, and so on are available in Essential Edit.

The EditControl offers Visual Studio like auto indentation behavior for text enclosed within brackets. The text is automatically indented one tab or an equivalent number of spaces to the right from the opening and closing brackets.

The EditControl provides Visual Studio like support for collapsing and expanding blocks of code through the use of collapsers (plus-minus buttons). Sections of code which form the outlining blocks can be specified using the configuration settings. The outlining blocks can not only be specified for code but also for plain text.

These outlining blocks can also be specified through code. Tooltip displaying the contents of the collapsed block of text can also be viewed in the EditControl.

The outlining tooltip is built-in and appears automatically when the mouse is placed over the collapsed block of text.

The EditControl supports Visual Studio like block indent and outdent functionality. When a block of code is selected and the Tab key is pressed, the appropriate number of tab spaces are added to the beginning of each line in the selected block. This will move the selected section of code by appropriate number of tab spaces to the right.

Similarly when the Shift+Tab key combination is used, the tab spaces added previously are removed, and the selected code is moved by appropriate number of tab spaces to the left.

Hence the previous indenting action performed by the tab key gets undone by pressing the Shift+Tab keys combination.

The EditControl supports content dividers similar to those in the VB.NET code of the Visual Studio.NET code editor. This illustrates logical divisions and presents a better layout for the contents in the EditControl, thereby improving the readability of code. The location of the content dividers can be specified in the configuration file.

Keywords in the EditControl can be formatted and customized as required. This is done by identifying the keywords in the EditControl and modifying their configuration settings.

The EditControl provides options to use Tabs and Spaces in it. Customization options are available for tab size, in terms of spaces, and its behavior, with respect to focus transfer. Interconversion between tabs and spaces are also possible while using the EditControl.

Unicode is a standard, to encode all of the universal languages correctly on computers. Beside solving many Internationalization issues, Unicode-enabled programs also run faster under Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista.

Complete support is offered for the display and serialization of the Unicode characters while using the EditControl. Moving Unicode text between the EditControl and other word processing software programs can be done utilizing the copy/paste clipboard functions.

The EditControl supports wrapping both words and characters in one or more lines, to view its entire contents. It also supports wrapping at the control border or the specified text area border, which can be separated from the wordwrap margin area using a custom style line. The wordwrap margin area can be customized with gradient background colors.

Wordwrap in the EditControl

The text in a particular column, can be wrapped between the EditControl's text area and wordwrap margin rather than at the right edge of the control. Further the wordwrap region can be conventionally customized to any desired section of the EditControl.