Up and Running with Peppy

Once peppy is installed, starting the application depends how you installed the code.

Installed using easy_install: (RECOMMENDED)

If you used easy_install to install the latest version from the Python Package Index, a python script named peppy will be installed in the system binary directory, so simply typing peppy on the command line will start the program.

Downloaded from source:

If you downloaded peppy but did not install the source, you run the application with the command line python peppy.py from within the peppy directory.

Installed from the downloaded source:

If you ran python setup.py install on the downloaded source, a python script named peppy will be installed in the system binary directory.

Installed a binary distribution:

This is only applicable to Windows and Mac OS X. The install process will leave an icon somewhere, and you can just click on that.

Command Line Use

When you start peppy from the command line, you can specify options and URLs to load. For example, running from a source distribution, you might use a command line like this:

python peppy.py README /tmp/file.txt http://www.flipturn.org/index.html

which tells peppy to open three URLs: the local file README in the current directory, the file /tmp/file.txt, and the index.html file from http://www.flipturn.org.

Options

There are many command line options available, the most useful of which are outlined below. You can see the full list by running peppy with the --help argument.

-d:

Send all debug printing to the console

-t:

Run in test mode – allow multiple peppy processes (see the next section) and send all debug printing to the console

-v:

Run in verbose mode, which turns on a lot of debugging output. Use in combination with -d or -t to send the output to the console

Single Peppy Process

Normally, peppy only allows a single process per user so that subsequent file open requests (by starting peppy from the command line with an argument) will actually be opened by the already running process. This can be disabled by preference or by the -t option as described above.

Using the Basic Menu Functions

The GUI should be similar to typical windowed applications on your platform. The layout of the menu attempts to follow the Apple style guidelines for the menu bar even though peppy works with all platforms and not just Mac OS X. I found their guidelines useful and logical, and so applied them to my work.

There are seven menu titles that will always appear in the menu bar, and additional titles depending on the major mode. The seven are: File, Edit, View, Tools, Documents, Window, and Help.

The File menu contains the common file load, file save, and related options. The Edit menu holds commands related to editing and selecting text or data, and also is where you’ll find the preferences. View holds menu items that affect how the major mode displays its contents, but nothing that actually alters the data – just how the data is viewed. The Tools menu holds standalone commands that either start a process or don’t change the contents of the document. The Documents menu contains a list of currently open documents, but note that some documents may not have an active view. Window holds a list of top level peppy windows, allowing you to switch back and forth between them. And finally, Help contains menu items related to documentation.

Opening Files

Peppy provides several commands to open files, from the traditional GUI file dialog using the File -> Open -> Open File menu command, to the more emacs- like File -> Open -> Open File using Minibuffer command (bound to C-x C-f in emacs keybinding mode).

Editing Files

Once a file has been opened, a new tab will appear in the window that shows the GUI that is used to edit that type of file. There are specific types of editing modes, called major modes, for different types of files. For instance, plain text files are editing using the Fundamental major mode, while python source files are edited using the Python major mode. Both these major modes are similar is that they use a text editing component (called the StyledTextCtrl in wxPython, which is based on the Scintilla source code editing component). However, unlike most editors, text files are not the only thing that can be edited. There are major modes for editing binary files, and even hyperspectral images.

Saving Files

After editing the file, it must be saved before the changes can be made permanent. Like opening files, there are several ways to save the file. You can use the File -> Save to save the file if you want to overwrite your changes, or File -> Save As to pull up a traditional file save dialog to save it to a new file. Some major modes provide other ways to save the file in the File -> Export menu.