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5.4.1 CoCoA on a Macintosh

For the GUI (Graphical User Interface) follow the specific pages in the graphical manual, for the textual interface follow the instruction for Unix. The following lines refer to the old CoCoA-4.0 for Macintosh OS 9. The CoCoA user interface on the Macintosh OS 9 is based on Mel Park's PlainText (v.1.6) which handles very large text files (larger than 32K). It uses standard Macintosh editing techniques, so Macintosh users should be familiar with its basic operations.

Double-clicking on the CoCoA icon or on the icon of a CoCoA document will start up the system. The system draws the menu bar, opens a text editing window and loads the CoCoA packages and then possibly user's packages (via the userinit.coc file).

After the system is started, it is ready to receive and execute commands. To execute a CoCoA command, type it into the window, ending it with a semicolon, then press the enter key. If the command occupies more than one line then highlight the whole command using the mouse and then press the enter key.

At this point the following part of the text of the active window is taken as being the current command:

* if there is no selection (the cursor is blinking somewhere), then the row containing the cursor is taken as current command;

* if there is a non-null selection range, then the whole selection is taken as current command (in this way the system can process multiline commands).

The editor uses all the standard Macintosh editing techniques as well as some special ones:

* Double-clicking on a word select the entire word. * Triple-clicking anywhere in a line selects the whole line. * Double-clicking on or just before a parenthesis, a bracket, or a brace, i.e. one of following symbols ( , ) , [ , ] , { , } causes all the text between that symbol and its matching symbol to become selected.

IMPORTANT NOTE. Devices of type FILE are not yet available with the Macintosh interface.