Basic program editing procedures

LavaPE provides three basic groups of views:

1. The declaration view, a tree view, which you principally know from the Windows Explorer and other applications. It is accompanied by the include file view and the override view.
2. The exec view for editing executable Lava code, which makes use of the Windows "rich edit view". It disables the normal text editing functions of the latter, however, and allows you only to select and edit (insert, delete, replace, cut, copy, paste, ...) entire syntactic constructs. Getting used to this structure editing style of editing executable code is perhaps the biggest hurdle that you have to take when learning to use LavaPE, but once you have got accustomed to it, structure editing is also the most important source of increased productivity as compared with the traditional text-editing style of program development. (Cf. also the section on Lava's point-and-click philosophy.)
3. The form view (with two sub-views) serves for specifying form representations of Lava data structures. The first sub-view is a WYSIWYG view of the respective form while the second sub-view is a tree view of the fields and sub-structures of the form. You can double-click the elements of this tree view to open corresponding property sheets which allow you to edit the layout and representation properties of the respective form elements.