Re: st: creating keyboard shorcuts on windows

[Phil Schumm <pschumm@uchicago.edu>]

On Jul 9, 2008, at 10:10 AM, Murali Kuchibhotla wrote:
> I have a question that is very similar to Andrea's previous post.I  
> often write my code in a do-file with the delimiter turned on.This  
> creates a problem for me when I am only interested in running a  
> part of the code.If I select a portion of the code and click on the  
> 'do-selection'tab in the tools option of the do-file editor I am  
> confronted with the error message,"option ; not allowed".For lack  
> of a better option I have to resort to copying the code from the do- 
> file editor and pasting it in Stata's command window and then  
> removing the ; symbol before running it, which is extremely  
> tedious. Is there a better way to do this? Thanks.


Couple of comments.  First, the obvious -- don't use delimiters.  I  
acknowledge that some people prefer them, but, spending most of my  
time now in either Stata or Python, I've grown quite fond of the  
cleanliness of not having them.  Especially when using a language  
interactively, once you've grown accustomed to not using them, being  
required to use them is a real pain.

If you're one of those people who has carefully considered this  
option and decided that you prefer to use delimiters, then there are  
at least two things you can do.  First, you can modify the script  
that your text editor uses to send the selected commands to Stata so  
that it adds the following line at the beginning:

    #delimit ;

Of course, that would cause problems if there are times when you  
don't want to use the delimiter.  In that case, you could create two  
commands: one which sends the lines to Stata as-is, and the other  
which prepends the appropriate #delimit statement at the beginning.   
IOW, you would then have both "Run selection with semicolons" and  
"Run selection without semicolons."

Alternatively (and a bit more difficult to implement), since use of  
delimiters is optional in Stata, and, I'd bet, is practiced by a  
minority of users, if I used them I'd want to have some good utility  
functions which switched back and forth.  IOW, a function that would  
go through my do-file and change

command
another command that ///
    is continued

to

command;
another command that
    is continued;

and vice-versa.  Indeed, there may already be functions out there to  
do this.  But I'd want to be able to call it from within my text  
editor, so that I could switch back-and-forth easily.  Once you had  
this function, you could then alter your "Run selection" command to  
auto-sense whether your selected code was using delimiters or not,  
and, if so, then include the appropriate #delimit statement.  I'm not  
sure at this point whether such implicit behavior would really be  
desirable -- the "2 commands" approach I described first might be the  
better approach (though I'd still want to have the ability to convert  
back and forth if necessary).


-- Phil

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