Philippe Glaziou
>
> In my experience, smcl files can only be viewed with the stata
> viewer and the command -type- in stata8(console), none of which
> offer an even basic text search feature --or I could not find it.
> One option is to save or translate your logs as text, and view
> them with any tool that allows a text search.
>
> I also find it a bit irritating to be unable to do a text search
> within a long help page. An exemple comes to mind: Nick Cox has
> just released an update of his great package -egenmore-. I am now
> interested in using his functions for dealing with minutes and
> hours. Lazy as I am, I will want to jump to the first occurence
> of "minute" or "hour" in the help page, rather than skimming
> throught it until I find the right functions. Also, going up one
> page (or going up one occurence) when needed, even though -more-
> is set on, would often be helpful. All this is a given in pretty
> much every unix text application, and I would really hate seing
> stata evolving towards a windows/mac click-me-here thing with
> fancy windows and a gastronomic menu. Unfortunately, this is
> were the market seems to be these days.
>
> Anyway, the new graphics are superb, and stata(console) is
> greatly improved, which both make me a very happy customer.
>
Thanks for the comment on -egenmore-, which
also includes the work of Kit Baum, Nick
Winter and Steven Stillman.
Naturally, I agree that some way to search like
this would be a helpful feature.
Your admiration for doing things the Unix
way is shared by Stata's developers. At the same
time, it is becoming clear to me, as a ardent
enthusiast for Unix ways and also for command language
interfaces, that -- at least with much of the new graphics -- using
the dialogues and seeing the command language
produced is probably the easiest way to learn it.
As you say, standard text tools allow searching,
on which I add two comments:
1. Note that Stata's own -doedit- can be useful
for looking at help files, so long as they are
not too big.
. findfile whatever.hlp
. doedit `r(fn)'
finds whatever.hlp along your -adopath-
and opens it in -doedit-. This process is
automated in -fedit- from SSC.
2. As it happens, -egenmore.hlp- is too big for
-doedit-. So it is useful to be able to integrate
your favourite text editor smoothly with Stata
and many suggestions under that heading are bundled
at
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/docs/textEditors.html
-- the collective effort of some 23 Stata users.
Nick
[email protected]
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
