6. Typeout

Typeout is the mode af uses to display large amounts of text such as mail messages or help information. When af uses typeout, the typeout window appears, covering the entire screen apart from the echo area. Once you exit typeout, the window disappears, "uncovering" the original windows.

If possible, each line of the text is displayed as a single line on the screen. If a line is too long to fit on a single screen line, then it will be displayed on several screen lines, with a `\' at the extreme right margin of all but the last of them. The `\' says that the following screen line is not really a distinct line in the text, but just the continuation of a line too long to fit the screen. This is called line wrapping, and the lines after the first are often referred to as continuation lines.

When you are viewing typeout, the position indicator in the mode line will often say `MOR'. This is because typeout does not wait to read the entire input before displaying the first page, and since af doesn't know how many lines there are in the text yet, it will give the position as `MOR' to indicate this.

Most of the time, typeout consists of a single section. But when typeout is displaying related outputs, such as the body parts of a multipart message, typeout will consist of several sections. Each section of typeout will be displayed separately.

Sometimes, the typeout window will appear, but you will still be able to carry on with some other operation (such as displaying the help options via C-h C-h C-h). In these cases the typeout window will disappear when the operation is completed.

Within typeout, only the cursor motion commands, the scrolling commands and the text searching commands can be used. To exit typeout, simply type C-g. The other af commands are irrelevant when you are just viewing text. Here is a brief summary of the commands available in typeout:

SPC

Scroll the text up to show the next page of text. If you are already at the end of the text, then exit typeout (typeout-scroll). This is a convenient way of paging through short amounts of text.

C-v

Scroll forward (a windowful, or a specified number of lines) (scroll-up).

M-v

Scroll backward (a windowful, or a specified number of lines) (scroll-down).

C-n or n

Scroll forward one line (next-line).

C-p or p

Scroll backward one line (previous-line).

C-] or ]

Move to the next typeout section (next-section).

C-[ or [

Move to the previous typeout section (previous-section).

C-l

Redraw the display (recenter).

C-s regex RET

Search forward through the text for a line matching regex (search-forward). See section 15. Searching Mail Folders.

C-r regex RET

Search backward through the text for a line matching regex (search-forward). See section 15. Searching Mail Folders.