Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

2.1.1Of Mice and Menus

Because Smalltalk images are intended to work identically on many different operating systems, you may find some of the user interface may be slightly different from what you’re used to. In order to help you understand the differences, we will outline the common stumbling points here.

Click. This is a standard mouse click, and is used to move focus to an item, to select an item in a list, and to select sections of text.

Right Click. We will use right-click to describe the action that will bring up the "context menu" on an item: this menu holds a list of actions relevant to the selected item. Mac users who are using a single button mouse will generally find that pressing the Control key while clicking the mouse button will have the same effect.

The Third Button. Smalltalk was first used with three-button mice, and some advanced features of Pharo may require you to emulate a three-button mouse. The ’third-button’ may be bound to another button on your mouse, or the mouse scroll-wheel. Alternatively it may require you to press a key while clicking — the Alt key or the Command (Apple) keys on Macs are common choices. You shouldn’t worry about this until you need it, but it’s useful to know just in case you accidentally invoke one of these actions and wonder where it came from.

World Menu. To launch new applications and open new windows, you will use the World Menu. This can be opened by clicking anywhere on your Seaside desktop (i.e., left-clicking on the background area). We will use a shorthand to refer to this: World | Workspace means "click on the desktop to bring up the World Menu, then select the Workspace entry".

Workspace. When you want to execute some code, you do so by opening a new workspace from the World Menu: use World | Workspace.

Try this new knowledge out now: Open a new workspace window. Type 1 + 1 into the window, and select it. Now right-click and select Print it from the context menu. You should see the answer 2.

Copyright © 19 March 2024 Stéphane Ducasse, Lukas Renggli, C. David Shaffer, Rick Zaccone
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

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