Mouse Support

Epsilon supports a mouse under Windows and under X11 in Unix. You can use the left button to position point, or drag to select text. Double-clicking selects full words. (When a pop-up list of choices appears on the screen, double-clicking on a choice selects it.) Use shift-clicking to extend or contract the current selection by repositioning the end of the selection. Holding down the Alt key while selecting produces a rectangle selection.

Once you've selected a highlighted region, you can drag it to another part of the buffer. Move the mouse inside the highlighted region, hold down a mouse button and move the mouse to another part of the buffer while holding down the button. The mouse cursor changes to indicate that you're dragging text. Release the mouse button and the text will move to the new location. To make a copy of the text instead of moving it, hold down the Control key while dropping the text.

Dragging text with the mouse also copies the text to a kill buffer, just as if you had used the corresponding keyboard commands to kill the text and yank it somewhere else. When you drag a highlighted rectangular region of text, Epsilon's behavior depends upon the whether or not the buffer is in overwrite mode. In overwrite mode, Epsilon removes the text from its original location, replacing it with spaces. Then it puts the text in its new location, overwriting whatever text might be there before. In insert mode, Epsilon removes the text from its original location and shifts text to its right leftwards to fill the space it occupied. Then it shifts text to the right in the new location, making room for the text.

You can use the left button to resize windows by dragging window corners or borders. For pop-up windows only, dragging the title bar moves the window.

A pop-up window usually has a scroll bar on its right border. Drag the box or diamond up and down to scroll the window. Click on the arrows at the top or bottom to scroll by one line. Click elsewhere in the scroll bar to scroll by a page. In some environments, ordinary tiled windows have a scroll bar that pops up when you move the mouse over the window's right-hand border, or (for windows that extend to the right edge of the screen), when you move the mouse past the right edge. The toggle-scroll-bar command toggles whether tiled windows have pop-up scroll bars or permanent scroll bars.

Under X11, you can adjust the speed at which Epsilon scrolls due to mouse movements by setting the scroll-rate variable. It contains the number of lines to scroll per second. The scroll-init-delay variable contains the delay in hundredths of a second from the time the mouse button goes down and Epsilon scrolls the first time, to the time Epsilon begins scrolling repeatedly.

The right mouse button displays a context menu (which you can modify by editing an .mnu file, see Customizing Epsilon's Menu).

You can click (or hold) the middle mouse button and drag the mouse to pan or auto-scroll--the speed and direction of scrolling varies as you move the mouse. This works on wheeled mice or on any mouse with three or more buttons. When you click the middle mouse button while holding down the Shift key, Epsilon pastes text instead. See the mouse-center-yanks variable to change its behavior.

Some mice have additional buttons. If the environment supports it, Epsilon recognizes buttons 4 and 5 and makes them scroll up and down. You can bind these buttons to different commands or to nothing using the bind-to-key and unbind-key commands.

Epsilon for Windows or Unix (under X11) also recognizes wheel rolling on wheeled mice, and scrolls the current window when you roll the wheel. See the wheel-click-lines variable for more details.

Under X11, some programs automatically make any text you select using the mouse available to be pasted in other programs. See the variable mouse-selection-copies to turn on this behavior for Epsilon.

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