Much of your work with VA Smalltalk involves editing text. Many browsers in the development environment use text panes. Text panes are typically large panes where you edit Smalltalk code. The text panes in the browsers offer consistent editing tools across the Smalltalk development environment.

Text panes have two editing modes: insert and delete. When a browser first opens the text pane is in insert mode, which is indicated by the cursor displayed as a vertical bar. You can add new text without overwriting existing text. The delete mode is indicated by the cursor being a block. In delete mode, new text will overwrite existing text. The Insert key toggles between these modes.

You can select text to be used for a later operation. Selecting text is sometimes called highlighting or marking text. Selected text will be highlighted when displayed. You can select text either by dragging the mouse across the selection, or by holding down the Shift key and moving the cursor with the Home, End, or arrow keys.

In general, there are multiple ways to accomplish a given editing task. The table below describes text editing operations. You can practice these operations in the Transcript or in a Workspace.