On screen keyboard
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I’ve recently start chipping away on a project. I haven’t been able to use a physical keyboard as often as I’d like and instead have been relying on the controller. I gotta say, the way Fuze4 allows you to insert text with a controller is so good. Instead of tap tap tap on the Dpad to get to the letter you want you Just position the joystick. After a few projects your muscle memory kicks in. I actually got pretty fast on the controller. Then the triggers and shoulder buttons adds an addition layer of maneuverability in the text editor. You can select text skip words ect. Finally the ability to copy and paste makes it easy to move blocks of text. Probably the only thing that is missing for me is selecting full lines at a time but maybe that is there. Of course it will never replace a physical keyboard, I just can’t believe how well the controller feels when typing. Just wanted to share my recent experience.
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@linser22 I couldn't agree more! I wrote at least half of a game I made laying in bed, with a combination of one of those rubber-tipped capacitative styluses and the Pro Controller. It's very viable!
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It’s great once you get used to it! I have done 99% of my Fuze programming using the software keyboard.
I just love to sit in my favourite armchair with the Switch in my hands and type away. Very cozy!
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Thanks for the kind words! The documentation should be better on this but you actually can select a whole line with the controller by triple tapping ZR.
It sounds like Linser has found this but you can also hold ZL and use the left and right directional buttons to jump over words and the up/down buttons to quickly move between function definitions or the beginning/end of the program (there is currently a known crash if you make a new line at the end of the program after arriving there using this functionality, however this will be fixed in the next patch).
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Is there anything else we should know about? All this time - two plus years - struggling while moving to the end of a long program with the d pad in order to edit the line. Celqi 3d Map Editor has well over 12000 lines. I can't remember why I needed to remove a section of code as per the instructions but it took me well over a hour of hunting down the necessary lines, highlighting and deleting them. With the above knowledge regarding holding down ZL etc. I could have saved myself a load of time. Sorry about the moan but I love Fuze and am waiting with batted breath for any update in the pipeline. Thanks for reading this.
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The best ways to select large amounts of multiline text:
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While holding ZR, open the code bookmarks list and select a bookmark. The selection will expand to the bookmarked location.
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Begin quickfind for a word. While the quickfind prompt is visible (a box around the word with L and R to the sides), hold ZR and press L or R to jump to the next instance of the word. The selection area will expand to that word.
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(Touchscreen only.) While holding ZR to select, hold page up or page down on the virtual keyboard. The selection area will expand to follow the screen.
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(Touchscreen only.) While holding ZR, double-tap home or end on the virtual keyboard. This will expand the selection range to the start or end of the file.
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(Touchscreen only.) Put the text cursor at the start of the selection. Scroll to the selection end point with the right stick/touchscreen. Hold ZR and tap the touchscreen at the selection end point to select the entire area.
I use the touchscreen for the virtual keyboard and only just now realized that select + page up/page down/home/end doesn't work if you're using only the controller because selecting changes the A button's function to paste instead of keyboard input.
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@mozipha Thanks for the extra tips. Very useful. I've just started a chess PGN file reader. Hoping to convert e4, d4 etc. to x?, y? and then plot an appropriate sprite to the screen. I want to be able to replay a complete game move by move on a nice onscreen chess board. I've got a feeling this is going to be a long program with many lines. Should be fun. By the way, any idea how to find the length of a saved file? Thanks.
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@faz808 You can get file length by checking len(fileHandle). It's not documented, as far as I know, but len() treats the file just like it treats a string or an array. Note that you can't delete characters from a file, only overwrite, so the file length may not tell you how much usable data is actually in the file. My suggestion is to pick a particular unicode character to represent unallocated file space, use that character to overwrite any data you want to delete from the file, and then search for that character to find the end of the valid data within the file.
