The editor has a number of useful features with which to make editing your documents easier. (at least thats the aim)
Syntax Highlighting
Inline tagging
Context sensitive menu
Auto completion
Auto entity insertion
With HTML documents all tags will be highlighted if you have this feature enabled. The tags are organised into groups and you can select a fore and back color for each group. Color coding is turned off by default to change that look at . For Perl documents there is currently only fixed syntax highlighting. The highlighting isn't done very well, but I think its better than the alternative of it being unstable and risking loosing what you are editing, as is the case with the GtkEditor widget.
This is a particularly nice feature, by which, you get a popup menu of all the legal attributes for the current tag, based upon the documents DTD, or the users default DTD if the document hasn't got one. It works as follows. BODY | Where the " | " character is the cursor. Now if space is pressed when the cursor is after the tag name, but still inside the pair then the popup will appear. Now you may not actually want to use the popup menu, in which case if you just ignore it andkeep typing it will disappear. This option can be disabled in the preferences if you so wish, and is turned ON by default.
A right click anywhere in the editor will popup the editor menu. This allows you to save pages, create new ones, gives closer access to the edit and CVS menus, and also allows you to execute helper applications and plugin scripts. There are two other options that may appear on the menu (when working with HTML documents) that may appear if you click on a tag. These are: TAG NAME at the top and "Tag Attributes" at the bottom
The first gives you access to the same menu as that of the inline tagging option, the second will open a dialog up which allows you to edit all the attributes for a tag at once.
If the document you are editing is a java source file then a "Java" menu will appear at the top of the context menu. This gives you access to a user definable java compiler.
This is performed whenever a character is entered, so long as a matching > isn't found, and the cursor is placed between them ready for you to enter the tag name. The same is performed whenever a & character is entered so you can enter the entity name.
Some languages use characters which are not part of the normal ascii character set, such as German letters with umlauts above them. The editor will recognise these characters when you type them and insert the appropriate HTML entity for them. This feature can be disabled should you wish the actual character to be inserted, or can be enabled on a character set basis. In the latter case only symbolic entities, such as quot; will be auto inserted unless the character set is ISO-8859-1, in which case full entity insertion will be performed.