Guru Readers Contribute Their Favorite SEU Tips

I have a couple of comments about your article, Lesser-Known SEU Commands. First, I’m still unashamedly an SEU user for one main reason: I like the “instantaneousness” of it. I can log in to the green screen and start editing a source member within SEU in just a few seconds, vs. the load/startup time of WDSc, the loading of libraries and files and member lists, and so forth.

Yes, I know–I can preload WDSc. I can set filters for libraries and files and members. I can create project definitions to load and display the views I need, etc. But nothing beats SEU for getting down to business very quickly. And often this quick start makes up for the relative inefficiency of SEU versus WDSc.

As for your SEU tips, I occasionally use the “hide text” technique (your tip #4), but I find that using F15 (Browse/Copy) and “browsing” the same member that I’m editing is even handier. I can then scroll both windows, to see as much or as little of each code section that I need. And, of course, I can also use F6 to change the relative window sizes. Not to mention, you definitely want to remember that when you accidentally delete something (we never do that, right?), you can instantly recover from your “previous version.”

–Jim

I got quite a bit of response to that article. Here are more tips and comments from several professionals who read this newsletter. In those cases where more than one author submitted the same tip, I tried to pick a good representative.

I haven’t used SEU in a good while, but I used to use XX in combination with the Change command. Let’s say you have a block of L1 calculations that you want to duplicate to L2. Use CC…CC…B to copy the block. Then, use XX…XX to exclude all the lines you just copied. Now, on the SEU command line at the top, use ‘c L1 L2 a x’. The a and x arguments tell SEU to change L1 to L2 for all occurrences that are excluded. Then use F5 to see the excluded lines that didn’t meet your search criteria.

–Buck

Does everyone know the commands to see the errors in a compilation listing? (As if you’d ever have any!?) Try the following:

1. From an SEU edit member screen, press F15.
2. Change Selection from ‘1’ (member) to ‘2’ (spool file).
3. If the last compilation was done by the user profile that you are currently using, pressing Enter splits screen into two panels. The top one shows the source member that is being edited. The bottom panel displays the spool file generated by the last (failing) compilation.
4. On the SEU command line type ‘*err’ and scan for it with F16.
5. SEU positions the cursor to the first error in the compile. Subsequent use of F16 will show other errors.

Hope that helps!

–David

This works if you compile in batch, David. For interactive compiles, you have to change the Job portion under Browse/copy spool file to the identifiers for your interactive job. (It won’t work to key a single asterisk to indicate the current job.) This is one of the main reasons I typically compile in batch when editing with SEU.

—Ted

Use the O and OO commands to overlay text. Type C in the line you wish to use as the overlay. Type O to overlay a single line, or OO at the starting ending lines of a range of source you wish overlaid. This is especially useful in shops where modifications to code are never removed, only tagged.

–Robert

I use WDSc most of the time, but for quick fixes, I use SEU. I occasionally use the O, On and OO overlay command with the C (Copy) command. Copy with overlay is great for copying a blank comment line over blocks of code that I want to comment out.

A couple of other handy SEU commands:

• CR/CCR – Allows you to copy a line or a block to multiple targets until you hit F5.
• RPP – Block Repeat. Handy when copying a sub-routine skeleton.
• RRn – Move a block n spaces to the right. Very nice for indenting in free-format.
• LLn/LLtn – Move a block n spaces to the left and optionally truncate.

–Bill

My work requires me to “mod mark” all changes to code. After making extensive changes to a source member, here is how I check to make certain all changed lines have been mod marked.

1. On the SEU command line, type in h ‘ ‘ a. This hides all lines containing a blank, which is everything.
2. Press F14 for Find/Change Options. Change Occurrences to process to 2 (All). Search for date defaults to today, which is usually what you want. Enter in the Compare field a 2 for Equal to or a 3 for Greater than if you back dated the search date.
3. Press F16. You should now see every line you modified and each line should contain your mod mark.

If this is too much to visually review, then enter h /mod a where /mod is your mod mark. By hiding all the mod marked lines you should see no remaining lines or see the lines that are not mod marked.

–Denny

I prefer to press F11, rather than F19 and F20, to window back and forth across the display.

To get more editing area, hide the function key legend. Press F13 and change Full screen mode to Y.

–Cletus the Codeslinger

When I told faithful reader and programmer extraordinaire Buck about the response I had received to the SEU tips, he pointed out that SEU is very popular, yet people still don’t use SEU to its capacity!

May I make two more comments in closing? First, I hope to be getting my grubby hands on WDSc Lite soon, and I am looking forward to it. Second, I think SEU’s a great editor. For me, it’s a matter of perspective. It doesn’t have some of the nice features in CODE and LPEX, but the situation could be much, much, much, much worse. I could be editing with vi on a Unix system! 😉

Thanks to everybody who wrote.

—Ted

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