Alpha Quick Start

Alpha
Version:	9.2.3 - "Suhail"
Last update:	2021-05-21 14:43:29

This help file provides a quick overview of some of the editing functions and user interface details for Alpha, and assumes that you have already read the basic Readme file. The Alpha Manual is a more comprehensive document explaining everything in greater detail.
See the Release Notes help file for a list of the major recent changes and known limitations with this version.
All the documentation is accessible in Alpha from the Help menu.

Installation
Creating and Saving Documents
Editing Documents
Modes, Menus, and Features
- Modes
- Menus and Features
Searching
Marks
The Window
The Numeric Keypad
Dynamic Menus
Text Manipulations
Credits and Registration

Installation

The Alpha application can be kept anywhere you like on the hard disk, typically in the Applications Folder. When Alpha is opened for the first time, it creates one subfolder in Preferences and one in Application Support. To uninstall Alpha completely, manually trash these three items.

Creating and Saving Documents

Documents can be created in Alpha via the File > New menu item under the File menu. Use the menu item File ↣ Open to open existing files, or open them by double-clicking on Alpha documents in the Finder, or via the Filesets menu (See Filesets Help for more info.)
Once a document has been opened, you can modify it by typing in it, cutting and pasting, using drag-and-drop editing, or manipulating the text with the numerous editing features that characterise Alpha.
Files can then be saved and/or closed, also via the File menu.

Editing Documents

At its most basic, editing in Alpha is very similar to editing within any text editor on the Mac. The current insertion point is shown by the cursor. The arrow keys (or clicking with the mouse) can be used to move the cursor, as in any other application.
Alpha can also move via larger increments of text:

Key combo	Description
`⌥-Left`	one word left
`⌥-Right`	one word right
`⌥-Up`	scroll window up
`⌥-Down`	scroll window down
`⌘-Left`	beginning of line
`⌘-Right`	end of line
`⌘-Up`	beginning of document
`⌘-Down`	end of document

Holding down the Shift key (⇧) tells Alpha to extend the selection to the designated distance.
Text can be cut, copied, or pasted by selecting a region of text and using the corresponding items in the Edit menu. Alpha supports multiple selections, that is to say selection of non contiguous blocks of text: hold down the Option key (⌥) while selecting.
Alpha also supports Drag and Drop: any selected piece of text can be dragged to another part of the same window, or to another window, or to another application merely by dragging it. To try this out, i) select a piece of text (for instance, double-click on a word), ii) move the cursor over the selected text, and iii) mouse down on the selected text and drag it elsewhere. An outline of the selected text will accompany the cursor until you release it, and a caret will mark the current insertion point while you move the cursor.
There are keyboard shortcuts for nearly all operations (but not drag and drop!), and it is possible to operate Alpha with the keyboard alone --- no need to take your hand off the keyboard to use the mouse! Experienced users tend in this direction. Users familiar with emacs will appreciate that many emacs keyboard shortcuts work in Alpha too, after activating the Emacs Feature (as explained elsewhere).

Modes, Menus, and Features

Modes

A central concept in Alpha is that of a mode. A mode is simply a preset configuration and a superset of features specific to a given editing task. For example, TeX mode is useful for editing (La)TeX documents, HTML mode is used for html documents, and so on.
Each mode defines special functions for inserting templates specific to such documents, for navigating a document based on its structure, for keyword colouring and comment characters, and finetunes many editing operations according to what concepts like word, paragraph and function mean in this setting. A mode may also provide support for interaction with relevant external programs or networks. Often all this functionality is packed into a mode-specific menu which is inserted automatically in the menu bar when the mode is active.
You can learn more about the mode of the active window by selecting the menu item Alpha ↣ Mode Setup ↣ Describe Mode, or by pressing ⌃-Help. The Installed Packages help file includes hyperlinks to help files for all currently recognized modes. Many modes also have Completion Tutorials installed which describe their support for the package Elec Completions -- to open them, select Alpha ↣ Mode Setup ↣ Completions Tutorial.
Alpha automatically enters the appropriate mode for each document/window depending on its file extension (.tex, .html, etc.) or the presence of some magic lines, and the mode will change as necessary when you switch amongst all of your open windows.
See the File-Mappings Preferences panel. Some file extensions are supported by different modes (for instance a file with the .m extension could be an Objective-C file or a Matlab file): see the Alpha ↣ Global Setup ↣ Preferred Mapping menu item to specify which mode should be chosen by default.
You can always change the mode of the active window by selecting the menu command Alpha ↣ Mode Setup ↣ Change Mode. You can also change the mode of the active window via the Mode popup menu found in the window's toolbar.
The default mode (when none of the standard modes appears to apply to your new window) is Text mode, which is rather neutral: in Text mode Alpha behaves mostly like a primitive text editor such as TextEdit.

Menus and Features

You can customize Alpha by turning on/off various menus and features. This is done by using the menu items Alpha ↣ Global Setup ↣ Menus and/or Alpha ↣ Global Setup ↣ Features. A menu is a stand-alone menu which is inserted in the menu bar, while a feature is some functionality which doesn't have a main menu connected to it. However, some features add a submenu or menu items to an existing menu or submenu.
See the Menus Preferences dialog and the Features Preferences dialog if you want to activate or deactivate some menus or features.
Many modes also have their own menus which are automatically inserted when you switch to the corresponding mode. You can also choose which menus and features to use for a particular mode by using the Alpha ↣ Mode Setup menus items. Note that there's normally little need to change which menu(s) to use in a particular mode. The mode menus are normally not very useful in other modes or as global menus.
See the Mode Menus Preferences and the Mode Features Preferences.

Searching

Alpha allows searching for character strings in either the active window, or within multiple files, whether or not they are currently open.
Searching is usually accomplished via the Search menu commands.
The main searching interfaces are provided by the following commands:

Search ↣ Find
Search ↣ Show Find Bar
Search ↣ Quick Find
Search ↣ Hyper Search (if the Hyper Search package is activated).

They are explained in the next sections.

Quick Find

The Search ↣ Find menu item brings up a dialog box that allows a search string, a string optionally used to replace found text, and several options. These options are:

'Forward': Search backwards or forwards.
'Ignore Case': The search routine will ignore the case of both the search string and the text to which it matches.
'Word Match': The search only matches complete words.
'Regexp': Regular expression matching. Regular expressions allow searching for specific character patterns, rather than just a literal character sequence. See Regular Expressions for more information.
'Multiple Files': see below.
'Patterns': This is a popup menu that allows search strings to be saved and later re-used.

Once a string has been found, the Search menu allows the text to be replaced with the 'Replace With' string from the Find dialog.
Tip: as with all dialogs in Alpha, checkboxes may be selected from the keyboard by pressing ⌘-'letter', where 'letter' is the first character of the checkbox's text: for instance, use ⌘I to toggle the state of the Ignore Case checkbox.
Tip: pull down the Search menu and press the Option key (⌥). There are several new items. Search Start returns the insertion point to where the last search started. Replace All uses the current search and replace strings to make substitutions through the rest of the file.
See the package Supersearch for more information.
The keyboard shortcut to display or hide the find dialog is ⌘F.

Find Bar

The Search ↣ Find menu item displays a Find bar at the top of the contents area of the current document window. It contains a search field to enter the search string. Press the Return key to start the search.
Open the small popup menu represented by a magnifyng glass on the left of the search field to display searching options (Ignore case, Wrap around, etc.).
If you click on the Replace checkbox, a second field appears to let you enter a replacement string. Use the Replace or All buttons to perform the replacement.
The keyboard shortcut to display or hide the find bar is ⇧⌘F.

Quick Find

Alpha allows the Find dialog to be bypassed by the Quick Find and Reverse Quick Find menu items from the Search menu. These functions search for character strings as you type: this is a technique known as incremental search. Use Escape, arrow keys or mouse click to terminate a search.
There is also a Quick Find Regexp menu item which lets you use regular expressions. Look in the Search menu while holding down simultaneously the Option and the Control keys (⌃⌥).
See the package Incremental Search for more information.
The keyboard shortcut to start an incremental search is ⌃S.
Tip: you can also perform incremental searches from the Find Bar. You must first select the Search ↣ Turn Incremental On menu item.

Multi-File Searches

Multi-file searches may be accomplished by using file-sets (which are basically lists of files), or by using the Hyper Search command.

Fileset Searches

File-sets are usually a list of files in a single folder. They can be created either through the Filesets menu (see Filesets Help, or through the Find dialog (select the Multiple Files tab in the dialog and then click on the New Fileset button).
To create the simplest kind of fileset, you supply a name, the folder that contains the files, and a pattern to select which files from the folder are to be contained in the fileset. To select all, the pattern should be `*'. To select just the files that end in `.tex', the pattern would be `*.tex'. To select all files that end in either `.c' or `.h', the pattern would be `*.{c,h}'.
Once you have a fileset, you search through the entire thing just by selecting Multiple Files and the fileset from the popup menu. The `Batch' checkbox in the Find dialog allows all matches to be listed in a new window, for more information see the Browser Help.
Read more about filesets in the Filesets Help file.

Hyper Searches

The Hyper Search package adds an Hyper Search command to the Search menu. It brings up a dialog which lets you perform multifile searches in any hierarchy of files (you do not have to specifically create a fileset for this). It is able to record the recent hierarchies, to filter the file names, and it displays the results in a window containing hyperlinks: clicking on a hyperlink opens the corresponding file and leads you directly to the matching line.
See the Hyper Search Help for more information about this package.
The keyboard shortcut to display the hyper search dialog is ⌃⌥⌘F.

Marks

Alpha allows manipulation of marks through a popup menu located in the horizontal bar under the window's toolbar. Marks are pointers to particular positions in the file.
The Marks popup menu allows marks to be automatically established for a file. How the file is marked depends on which mode you are using. For example, the Mark Window command will automatically create a mark for each section and subsection of a LaTeX document.
To create a floating menu palette with all of the marks in the active window, use the Marks Palette command in the Marks popup menu.
See the package Marks for more information.

The Window

Alpha's windows have several non-standard features. They are the following:

The global status bar (just below the menu bar) is where global messages are displayed, e.g. feedback from operations, and where Alpha asks for input to certain functions.
Command-clicking on the title pulls down a popup showing the complete pathname of the window's file. If you select the topmost item, the full path is copied in the pasteboard. Selecting another item (corresponding to a subfolder in the path), brings an Open File dialog pointing by default to this subfolder or, if the Shift key (⇧) is pressed, reveals the subfolder in the Finder.
The toolbar at the top of the window lets you display several standard toolbar items, common to most Mac applications, like for example Fonts, Print, and Customize. Control-clicking on the toolbar displays a contextual menu with commands to customize the toolbar.
The horizontal bar (known as control bar) located just below the toolbar contains several useful items:
- A path control displaying the full path of the file corresponding to the document window (if there is such a file). It looks like this:
- A popup button with an squared I icon: .
  The menu contains contains file and window related information, like how linebreaks are saved, and how wrapping of lines is handled in the window.
- A popup button with a squared M icon: .
  The Mode popup indicates the mode of the window, and allows to change mode manually.
- A popup button with a padlock icon: .
  The menu contains useful items if the file is under some sort of Version Control system (Alpha has built-in support for Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Fossil version control systems). Otherwise, the padlock indicates the read-only status of the window. No matter what the icon is, clicking on it will display a popup menu with several different options. This menu will also indicate if the active window is contained in one of your filesets.
- A popup button with a gears icon: .
  It is known as the Parse Functions menu. The content of this menu is mode dependent but will typically contain a list of all functions in the file. This menu is built when you press the icon and is therefore always up-to-date.
- A popup button with a bookmark icon: .
  It is known as the Marks menu. It contains useful items to manipulate the marks of the document window and a list of the current marks.
- A split-pane popup button: .
  It contains items which let you create or delete subpanes in the document window.
- A simple control (known as the Save button) with a bull's eye (◎) or a fish eye (◉) icon: .
  It shows whether the window is dirty and needs to be saved. Clicking the red icon saves the window.
The window-specific message bar (at the bottom of the window, just below the horizontal scroll bar, if active) contains first of all the line number indicator, then the column indicator (indicating the position within each line). Clicking here brings up a dialogue allowing you to indicate a position to go to. Next comes the window number, decorated with the command-clover symbol (⌘): this number is for the short-term memory of your brain and allows you to switch directly to a given window by ⌘N for some number N between 1 and 9. The window-specific message bar also receives certain window-specific messages.

See also the Window Preferences panel and the Appearance Preferences panel.

The Numeric Keypad

Alpha is able to use the numeric keypad as a navigation tool. Press ⇧-Clear (or Shift-Numlock) to turn on/off this feature or use the Num Lock preference in the General panel of the Global Preferences. You can also click on this hyperlink toggleNumLock to toggle the behavior of the keypad.
See the The Numeric Keypad section for more information about some of the navigation tools available.

Dynamic Menus

Alpha uses dynamic menus. This means that some menu items are changed if you hold down one of the modifier keys. Usually the Option key (⌥) is the one which reveals the hidden menu items, but there are also a few items which are revealed by holding down the Control (⌥) or Shift (⌥) keys. Try this out by pulling down the File menu and holding down one of the Option, Control, or Shift keys.

Text Manipulations

Automatic Wrapping

Line wrapping refers to Alpha's ability to display wrapped lines (when they are longer than the window's width) without inserting new line symbols. This is known as soft wrapping. You can turn this feature on or off using the Text Wrapping item found in the Info popup of document windows.

Line Breaking

Line breaking refers to Alpha automatically inserting line breaks as you type. The Alpha ↣ Mode Setup lets you modify several mode-specific flags, including the default Line Breaking setting. Each mode decides what the default line-breaking regime should be, but you can change this for any given window using the Info popup menu in the window's toolbar.
When Line Break is set to Automatic Line Breaking, Alpha automatically inserts a carriage return when a line becomes too long, respecting the value for the mode's Fill Column preference. See the Mode Preferences panel.
Note: when the package Auto Wrap Comments is turned on, text that is typed in a commented line will be automatically wrapped even if the current setting for Line Wrap is None. If you don't like this behavior, you should turn off the Auto Wrap Comments package. See the Electrics Preferences panel.

Automatic Indentation

Many modes have defined sophisticated indentation routines that are often specific to the context surrounding the cursor position. When this is the case, the mode will have an Indent On Return preference that can be turned on and off. When it is turned on, pressing Return will automatically indent the new line that is created. See the Mode Preferences panel.
Even if this preference is turned off, you can always indent the current line using the Text ↣ Indent Line/Selection menu commands. In addition, pressing ⌘-Return will always indent the new line, while ⌃-Return will always insert a new line without indentation.

'Tab' and other Special Keys

Alpha has several advanced features such as Electric Completions/Expansions that are invoked when you press some Special Keys. The keyboard shortcuts for such operations can be changed to suit your particular needs and habits, or they can be completely disabled by setting the shortcut to No Binding. The menu item Alpha ↣ Global Setup ↣ Keyboard Shortcuts ↣ Special Keys will open a dialog allowing you to define global keyboard shortcuts to particular functions. See the Special Keys Preferences panel.
For more information, see the Electric Bindings section. See also the Keyboard Shortcuts help file for more information about discovering some of the other keyboard shortcuts that have been defined, and how to create your own personalized set.

Other Text Manipulations

From the Text menu:

Fill Paragraph: reflows the current paragraph so that lines are approximately the same length.
Upcase Region: converts all selected characters to upper case.
Downcase Region (hold down the Option key): converts all selected characters to lower case.

From the File menu:

Text to Alpha: This menu item (in the File ↣ File Utilities submenu) prompts the user to select a folder, and then recursively changes the creator of all text files in that folder to Alpha. This is useful if you receive text files created by another editor.

Contextual Menu

Alpha provides sophisticated Contextual Menu support, obtained by pressing the mouse and the Control key (⌃) simultaneously, or, if your mouse supports it, by using the right mouse button. This support is based on the context of the mode of the active window as well as any text surrounding the click position. You can customize the menus/items that are presented in the CM, and have a different set of options for each given mode. See the Contextual Menu help window for more information.

Credits and Registration

Alpha is a freeware. It is an Open Source project called AlphaCocoa hosted by SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/alphacocoa.
Please see Alpha's Home Page for further information.
Back in the eighties, Alpha was initially created by Pete Keleher. Then development was taken over by a group of developers named the Alpha Cabal. The AlphaCocoa project is a complete rewrite of Alpha for Mac OS X based on Apple's Cocoa framework. This project was initiated and developped by Bernard Desgraupes.
Please use the Alpha developers mailing lists to discuss problems, suggestions etc. with this release. See the subscription options available at Alpha's Mailing Lists.
As in any software, there are a number of bugs or shortcomings which will hopefully be corrected in future releases. Please read the Bug Reporting file for how to provide an informative bug report, without which it is unlikely any bug you found can be fixed.