Subject: Re: how to shrink dot

From: John (I don't want no teenage queen / I just want my M-fourteen) Mackin <john@ civil.su.oz.au>
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 22:47:48 -0500

Scott and I are talking about shrinking dot.

    At first, I wanted to change the indentation of the stuff in between
    the inner braces in something like
    	for (..) {
    	  for (..) {
    	    stuff
    	  }
    	}
    where it was easier to double click on the brace than sweep out exactly
    the right lines.

You don't need to shrink dot for this to work.  This was the kind of thing
I thought you would have in mind.  All you have to do is to pick the whole
lines first.  Try this, tested in the very sam I am writing this mail in:
Snarf this command, then double-click inside the first brace, change to the
sam window and send:

x/^.*$/ x/^/a/    /

As you can see, it works on the inner lines only, as we want.

    More generally, it is easy to select a region with delimiters,
    but it you want to process the stuff between the delimiters
    you have to exclude them from dot.

I don't understand this.  When you use double-click to `select a region
with delimiters' sam _does_ exclude them from the selection: there is no
way to get it to _include_ them.  Maybe you mean if you are using an x
command -- can you give me another concrete example?

OK,
John.

---

From: Scott Schwartz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 21:34:53 -0500

[sorry for the delay replying; its been one of those weeks]

John writes:
| You don't need to shrink dot for this to work.  This was the kind of thing
| I thought you would have in mind.  All you have to do is to pick the whole
| lines first.  ...  x/^.*$/ x/^/a/    /

Workarounds, workarounds.  :-)

Suppose I want to do the formatting by pipeing to some program?  Then I
need the selection to be correct beforehand.

| I don't understand this.  When you use double-click to `select a region
| with delimiters' sam _does_ exclude them from the selection: there is no
| way to get it to _include_ them.  Maybe you mean if you are using an x
| command -- can you give me another concrete example?

There I was thinking of something like clipping mailbox entries.  If
you select one with something like /^From /;/^From / you need to trim
the top and bottom to get the actual message excluding the From line.