Source Editor

The Source Editor is a full-featured text editor that is integrated with the Form Editor, Explorer, compiler, and debugger. You can open the Source Editor by double-clicking an editable element. For example, double-click a Java or text object in the Explorer to open the Source Editor.

The Source Editor is the default viewer for all Java, HTML, JSP, and plain text files, as well as for any other type of file specified by an IDE module.

Source code displayed in the Source Editor window is syntactically colored. For example, all Java keywords are shown in blue and all Java comments in light gray. Guarded blocks of Java code generated by the Form Editor has a light blue background and cannot be edited. All colors are configurable.

Whenever the insertion point in the Source Editor window is immediately after a brace, bracket, or parenthesis, the matching brace, bracket, or parenthesis is highlighted.

The left margin displays annotation glyphs that indicate line status, such as breakpoints, the program counter, build errors, or bookmarks. The margin can also optionally display line numbers.

A faint vertical line in the Source Editor marks a suggested right margin for your text. This configurable margin is set to 80 characters from the left margin by default.

If you are editing more than one file, the bottom of the Source Editor window has tabs used to view different documents. From each of these tabs, the document can be saved, closed, docked, undocked, cloned, and other actions that depend on the state of the file and the modules that are installed. The tooltip for each tab displays more information about the file, including the type of file and the file's location.

Each modified and unsaved file in the Source Editor window has an asterisk (*) after its name on its tab and in the window title. You can save a file by choosing Save from the File menu, the Source Editor window's contextual menu, or the contextual menu of the file's tab.

Tip If the Source Editor only beeps when you try to enter new text, the file is a read-only file.
See also
Editing Source Files
Configuring the Source Editor

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