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201/NMODE Manual (Moving Up And Down Levels) Page 7-1
202/7. Moving Up And Down Levels
201/Subsystems and recursive editing levels are two states in which you are
temporarily doing something other than editing the visited file as usual. For
example, you might be editing the arguments prompted for by a M-X
command, or using a browser.
202/7.1 Subsystems
201/A 202/subsystem 201/is an NMODE function which is an interactive program in its
own right: it reads commands in a language of its own, and displays the
results. You enter a subsystem by typing an NMODE command which invokes
it. Once entered, the subsystem usually runs until a specific command to
exit the subsystem is typed. An example of an NMODE subsystem is the
buffer-browser, invoked by typing C-X C-B.
The commands understood by a subsystem are usually not like NMODE
commands, because their purpose is something other than editing text. In
the buffer-browser, for instance, the commands are tailored to moving up and
down a list of the existing buffers, reordering this list in various ways, and
to deleting buffers. In NMODE, most commands are Control or Meta
characters because printing characters insert themselves. In most
subsystems, there is no insertion of text, so non-Control non-Meta characters
can be the commands.
While you are inside a subsystem, the mode line identifies the subsystem by
identifying the mode of the current buffer. The special properties of the
subsystem are due to the kinds of commands that are available in this mode,
and to the keys that the mode associates with them. Because each buffer has
its own associated mode at any given time, if a user moves out of the buffer
associated with the subsystem into an ordinary text buffer, he/she will have
left the subsystem, even though he/she will not have used the normal
command for doing so.
Because each subsystem implements its own commands, we cannot guarantee
anything about them. However, there are conventions for what certain
commands ought to do:
Space Moves downwards, like C-N in NMODE.
Q Exits normally.
Help or ? Prints documentation on the subsystem's commands.
Not all of these necessarily exist in every subsystem, however.
202/7.2 Recursive Editing Levels
201/A 202/recursive editing level 201/is a state in which part of the execution of one
command involves doing some editing. You may be editing the file you are
working on, or you may be editing completely something totally different from
what you were working on at top level. Currently, the completion of
extended commands, the preparation of prompted input strings, and the
examination of buffers in the kill-some-buffers-command function all involve
201/Page 7-2 NMODE Manual (Recursive Editing Levels)
recursive editing levels within which the full power of NMODE is available.
202/7.3 Exiting Levels; Exiting NMODE
201/L]
On the hp9836, <STOP> will exit from NMODE to the hp9836 workstation top
level command interpreter. C-X C-Z will exit from NMODE into the PSL
interpreter, as will C-] L (Lisp-L) in Lisp mode.