Character surrounding macros

[Jeff Epstein]

I'm having a serious problem avoiding the 64 macros limit because of my "Character Surrounding Macros":

http://equity.wharton.upenn.edu/~epstei ... nding.html

It's frustrating because these macros are *exactly* the same, excepting the actual surrounding start/end text. The only reason these macros exist, is because there is no way to associate a key command to a specific clip book entry.

This "surrounding text" functionality is critical to me--it greatly increases my coding speed, but it's difficult to know that I'm wasting 20-30% of my precious 64 limit with these trivial macros.

Does anyone have advice on how these macros might be consolidated? No matter how klooj-ee the solution, I'm interested.

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A few of my own rambling thoughts...

How difficult would it be to implement macro parameters? Is this a feature that others could use as well? "Tool" paramaters are already possible.

There is currently no way to associate a macro to a clip book. Is this going to happen in a future version? This is not *exactly* what I need (I still need to differentiate between "selection" and "insert at cursor" macros, for each surrounding text item), but these surrounding text macros are darn close to clip books...

When associating a key commands to a clip book entry, I envision the following:

-----------
Clip book name: [drop down of clip books]
Clip item: [drop down of clip items in selected clip book]
Use current selection? ( )yes (o)no
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("Use current selection" is important. It's why I have two macros for each type of surrounding text. If no, then erase the current selection, if any, before inserting the clip. If yes, then the current selection should be surrounded by the clip start/end text)

And, when the clip book/entry is deleted, TextPad should react nicely. In other words, key commands should not become screwed up (as currently happens with macros, when you rename the *.TPM file), and you should get a nice error message, saying what's wrong.

Is this a suggestion others think is helpful? Is there anything else obvious (and not too impossible to implement) that should be added onto this suggestion?


Thanks!

[Ken]

I think it would be enormously helpful. My right wrist (sayit5Xfast) is bearing the brunt of my RSI and the main relief has been to try to use the keyboard as much as possible. I would like to see macro parameters as well.

Also is there a way to type a "macro code" into a file? Or is the only way through keystrokes. That is a feature I'd _really_ like. Probably it would involve writing a mini compiler. If that would turn TextPad into a memory hogging glutton then it drops off my request list.