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From: tpermutt@eng.umd.edu (Thomas Permutt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Entering Text
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.165900.26469@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 18 Jun 91 16:59:00 GMT
References: <692@ast.dsd.northrop.com>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
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Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
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In article <692@ast.dsd.northrop.com> dvorak@ast.dsd.northrop.com (dvorak joseph l.) writes:
>I need to provide a text field for user input into my
>Smalltalk/V program. I do _NOT_ want the user to have to
>select the the text like you must in the Transcript window. A
>specific key (a control-D perhaps) would terminate text
>entry. This would allow multi-line input. The text would be
>returned to my program as the result of the message sent to
>this text entry object.
>
>Can anyone tell me how to do this or point me to code that
>already does this? Thanks.
>
>Joe

It seems to me you can use the methods of class TerminalStream, for
example
     [Terminal read = CtrlD] whileFalse: [] .
Ignore the obscure documentation about "finite-state machine"; what
this does in the simplest case is character-by-character input from the
keyboard.
If you actually want the facilities of a TextEditor window, but simply don't
want the user to have to select the text, you can surely figure out what
he typed:  for example, start with a blank window and treat all text as
the input.  You will need to modify the dispatcher to notice your control/d,
though.
What you probably really want is a Prompter, though, modified to quit on
control/d instead of cr.  This should be easy.