Controlling your view

Razor provides you with a variety of options for controlling and organizing what is presented to you.

Date information

As shown earlier, the main display contains a scrolling list of the names of all the existing threads for the defined group. It is occasionally useful to also show information relative to when the thread was last modified.

By enabling the Days since last mod(^l) option from the View menu, the display will widen and add a note of the number of days since the thread was last modified. Similarly, you can choose the Modification date (^m) option from the View menu and the main display will now include the exact date of the last modification. A sample threads display with both Modification date and Days since last modification would be shown as




As with the UNIX command ls, dates occurring more than 6 months ago are shown as the date and year of the modification. Dates less than 6 months ago will display the date and time of day that the edit occurred.

Filtering the display

The threads program allows you to have a large number of threads within a single Razor group. This in turn can yield a particularly long and unfocused list being presented on the display.

It's possible to reduce and restrict the list to only those threads which meet certain selection criteria. Selecting the Display Filter option from the View menu (or using the ^F hot key) will bring up the following control panel.




Perhaps the best way of becoming familiar with the concepts of filtering the display list is to simply experiment with the above panel. Nonetheless, the following notes should help you understand some of the basic themes.

By entering text in the Name pattern field, you can restrict the list to only those threads that follow a particular naming convention. For example, entering the string "Test*" will prune the list to include only those threads beginning with "Test". The Options menu allows you to toggle between using normal UNIX style wild carding or regular expressions¹ for matching.

As restrictions are entered on the panel, the left footer will show a count of how many files within the group match your interests. Selecting the Apply button will cause the matched files to be displayed on the main list. It's possible to have the count updated either on a keystroke by keystroke basis, or only after typing a tab or carriage return. This personal preference is set from the Match while typing option of the Options menu item.

¹ See "Regular Expressions" on page 291.